


The Replacement

by Overlithe



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel, Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Action/Adventure, Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Bucky Barnes as Captain America, Bucky Cap, Canon-Typical Violence, Ensemble Cast, F/M, Friendship, M/M, Multi, Mystery, Romance, Thriller
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-11-28
Updated: 2015-04-12
Packaged: 2018-02-27 07:27:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 21,448
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2684384
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Overlithe/pseuds/Overlithe
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>AU/What-If. Steve falls off the train. Bucky doesn’t, and he takes up the shield long enough to land the <em>Valkyrie</em> in the ice. When he wakes up in New York almost 70 years later, the 21st century turns out to come with its own set of complications.</p><p>Mostly action/adventure with some mystery/thriller elements and slow-build romance.</p><p>(Additional characters and pairings will be added to the tags as they come into the story.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. The Fall

**Author's Note:**

> Hey guys! Writing [_Wasp Harvest_](http://archiveofourown.org/works/2620862/chapters/5844929) was immensely cathartic and rewarding, but after that fic clearly it was time for some lighter fare. I have been planning this fic for a long time, and once [Marvel Big Bang 2014](http://archiveofourown.org/collections/marvel_bang_2014) was out of the way, I figured it was time to get on with it. I love AUs and What-Ifs and while there are many excellent takes out there on the “Steve falls off the train instead of Bucky” concept, I hope you’ll like my spin on it. Given my various RL commitments, I don’t want to set an updates schedule for now, but hopefully you shouldn’t have to wait too long for each new chapter (she said ;)).
> 
> With that out of the way, let’s jump right on this train! /ba-dum-tish No, but seriously, I hope you’ll enjoy the story. And thanks once again to **muffinbitch** for the comments, suggestions, and epic brainstorming sessions!

**01. _The Fall_**

The blow was strong enough to bruise his bones. He had time to think, once— _blast-proof thanks Stark_ —then he struck twisted metal and his hands instinctively grabbed a rail as the shield embedded itself on the torn carriage wall.

His foot dangled over a chasm. _Christ_. A bit more to the right and—

Later, he would like to think that what happened next happened very, very fast.

It didn’t. It happened slowly, so slowly he had a thousand chances to change the outcome. He was just frozen, unable to do anything but watch as Steve cried out ‘Bucky!’, picked the fallen pistol off the floor, and exchanged fire with Zola’s contraption.

Later, Bucky would also like to think that he didn’t see Steve glance at him just a fraction, just for a split-second.

Long enough for Steve to get a glancing blow from the last blast of the robot’s cannon just as the machine died with a blue crackle of electricity and a groan of metal.

For all his strength, Steve was thrown back a few feet. For a moment Bucky was sure he was going to slam into him, but Steve’s hand grabbed the edge of the shield and Bucky had long enough to think _That was close_ before the shield pulled loose with a metallic _squoink_ sound. He felt the torn wall buckle under their weights, and the two of them pitched backwards into the hole.

He reached for Steve’s hand but he was too slow, his arm turned to molasses. He only managed to catch the other edge of the shield. The sudden yank nearly dragged Bucky out of the train as well, but his left arm remained stubbornly curled around the rail, the hand clamped on the metal.

‘Steve.’ It wasn’t even a cry. Steve hung from the other edge of the shield, dangling above the frozen river a thousand feet below. Bucky had been pulled halfway down with him; his right arm felt like it was going to rip out of its socket.

The rail wasn’t strong enough for both of them. Bucky could feel it tearing away, rivet by rivet.

Steve tried to gain purchase on the edge of the torn wall with his foot and his other hand, but they were too far away, and each motion sent darts of pain up Bucky’s arm. ‘Bucky, let go of the shield!’ Steve yelled. Snowflakes melted on his face, just below his helmet. ‘I can climb back on the train.’

_How?_

‘No.’ His grip on the shield was slipping and his back and arms were on fire. He was sliding down into the chasm. He tried to use his left leg to brace himself, pull the two of them back up, but his foot just slipped on the wet floor. He felt the skin of his palm tear as he was dragged down the rail. ‘Just hang on. I can—’

God, one of his bursts of strength. Just one.

Steve stared at him for one impossibly long moment. Bucky’s body was a slab of useless flesh. He could see the snow hanging in the air. A gloved hand’s grip slipping down burnished metal, then opening.

A sudden release. He felt a pop in his right shoulder.

‘Steve! _Steve!_ ’

Steve’s face was calm as he tumbled downwards and out of sight, until he was only a shrinking splash of blue and red in an ocean of grey. If he made any sound the pumping of the train’s pistons and the screech of cold rails drowned it out.

Bucky nearly slipped out of the hole right after him. Instead his right arm threw the shield to the train floor— _to hell with it_ —and his left arm released the rail and dragged the rest of him forward, onto solid ground. He kneeled at the very edge of the hole and leaned down, as far as he could, already knowing he would see nothing but the mountain slopes and the frozen river, pulling away.

‘Steve!’ he yelled. ‘Steve! Steve!’ Over and over. ‘ _Steve!_ ’

There was only swirling snow and the cold metal by his side.

***

‘I don’t know what we’re all waiting for.’ Too soft. No one could hear him in the busy room. He cleared his throat, spoke louder. ‘What’re we waiting for?’

Peggy was the only one at the table to meet his eyes. None of the others looked at him. Bucky didn’t blame them. He wouldn’t have wanted to look at himself either.

‘The search party should be out there right now,’ he said, and shifted his grip on the shield sitting at his side. He refused to let go of it. Not until he could return it to Steve in person.

‘Right now, the gorge is impassable,’ the colonel said. ‘You want to pay attention to the thing we can do something about, Sergeant?’

‘He can still be alive,’ Bucky said. He wanted to not sound like a whiny brat, and instead sound like who he was supposed to be: a soldier, a leader, someone his men could count on.

Then again, who could count on him? He’d spent most of his life playing the big hero in two-bit alley scuffles. And now look at what he’d done on the one time Steve had needed him the most.

‘It was a thousand foot drop,’ Gabe said, his voice very flat.

‘It’s possible. All I’m saying.’

‘Hell, son, you think we don’t know that?’ The colonel’s tone wasn’t wholly harsh, which somehow made it worse. ‘You think anyone is happy about this mess? We’ll have men combing every inch of the place with goddamn toothbrushes if they have to, but right now we have a madman who wants to blow up half the world, and Stark here tells me he can wipe out the entire Eastern seaboard in the time it takes us to sing Yankee-Doodle.’

‘One hour,’ Stark said, but Phillips wasn’t done yet.

‘Now, my new best friend says this is going down in less than 24 hours. So what do you think Rogers would want us to do?’

Bucky didn’t answer, but he didn’t have to. He saw Peggy’s head dip, heavy with misery. They understood each other, at least.

‘Where is Schmidt now?’ Jacques asked.

That was that, Bucky realised. The cloud of ash hanging over the table turned just a little less thick. People had talked. They would talk more. The world kept on spinning, as though nothing had happened.

The colonel tossed a photo on the table. ‘In Hydra’s last base, holed up like a mole 500 feet below the surface.’

‘Anyone got any ideas?’ Jim Morita said. He kept looking at the surveillance photo, as though it contained all the answers. ‘Because I don’t think he’s gonna invite us in.’

Bucky looked at the papers on the table, at the Hydra symbol on an intercepted letter. He hated them like he’d never hated anyone or anything before, but the hatred didn’t sharpen him, it just sat in his mouth and throat like a lump of cold poison.

‘Why not?’ The words were out of his mouth before the idea could take shape in his head, but then that figured. He glanced at Peggy. Her eyes were glassy with pain, but still she looked at him and nodded, once. _Hell no_ , he wanted to say. _Forget it. Not that_. Her eyes widened a little.

What choice did he have? What choice did any of them have?

‘Why not?’ he repeated. The words should sound like nails on a chalkboard, to fit in with this horrible joke of a thing they were about to do, but instead his voice was treacherously normal. ‘We got something he wants, don’t we?’ His hand gripped the shield so tightly his fingers felt numb.

The table looked at him.

‘What’s the plan?’ Dum Dum said.

_Sorry, Steve. I know you’d come up with something smarter._

‘I’m going to walk right to Schmidt’s front door.’

***

Getting himself captured wasn’t too difficult. Even he couldn’t screw that up too badly. He was sure the ruse was going to be spotted straight away—he put his all into the fighting, but even his all wasn’t good enough—but if any of the Hydra goons felt he was captured too easily, they kept it to themselves. After that, Bucky was sure the jig would be up as soon they started dragging him through the base. One of them would notice that he was too short, or all the places where the star-spangled uniform didn’t quite fit, or even the sourness balling up in his stomach.

No one did, though, and even the Numbskull was fooled at first. Maybe it was just the elation of getting to punch Captain America in the stomach, Bucky thought, on his knees, trying to catch his breath. Schmidt finally caught on, halfway through his rant. One gloved hand yanked Bucky’s chin up. The hairless brows furrowed. This close, his face—if it could be called that—was smooth as a billiard ball, as though someone had sandpapered the skin.

‘Who are you?’ Schmidt said. The edges of his fleshless nose flared a little.

‘Nobody,’ Bucky said, and managed to get most of the word out before Schmidt backhanded him. _Christ, he’s strong_. He looked up again, ears ringing, hot wetness dripping from his nose. Good. The pain didn’t matter as much as the time the Red Dope was wasting. _Keep doing that. I can take it_. ‘That all you got?’

Bucky couldn’t stop himself from flinching just a fraction as the hand reached for him again, but this time Schmidt only undid the strap on his helmet and yanked it off.

‘Surprise, jackass,’ Bucky said, just as the windows exploded.

***

The flight controls were locked. It figured.

‘Copy that,’ Peggy said. ‘I’ll get Howard on the line. He’ll work out a way for you to land.’

Bucky looked at the coordinates flickering madly on the nav screens, the white shapes of continents on the radar display.

‘There’s no time for that,’ he said. His voice was calm, which surprised him a little. When you shipped out, you told yourself that if the day ever came, you’d try to face death with some dignity, even if in the back of your mind you were sure you’d bawl like a baby. Those thoughts got knocked out of you quick, either by your first mortar round, or by your first big stretch of mind-killing boredom. Not much time to worry about death when you were trying to keep yourself and your men alive and well.

There was no need for that now. No boredom, no gunfire. Only clouds, gilded by the pale Arctic sun. It made everything seem not real. Like he could just drift onwards forever, kept airborne by whatever magic he’d just seen consume a man in front of him.

‘This bird is going to turn New York into a smoking crater and it’s travelling fast. Only thing I can do now is bring it down.’

‘Barnes—Bucky. You don’t have to do that.’ Her tone and the use of his name put the lie to her words, but he didn’t mind what she was saying. There were worse ways to go, he knew. ‘Listen, we’ll figure something out.’

‘Ah—sorry. Don’t really have a choice.’ Steve would come up with a plan to save them both, but Steve wasn’t here. He pushed the control yoke down, as far as it’d go. Seconds later the plane came out of the cloud bank and a stretch of water appeared, dotted with archipelagos of ice. ‘Hey, I—I want you to promise me a couple of things, all right?’

‘Anything.’

‘Really? Gotta do this more often.’ Neither of them laughed at that. ‘Steve—if you don’t find him, he died a hero, all right? Not getting killed because of some idiot.’

He could say it now, even if the thought of Steve slowly bleeding to death in some icy hell while the rest of them sat around a table was unbearable.

_Let it have been quick. Please let it have been quick._

‘Bucky, I—’

‘No, don’t worry about me.’ The rush from the fight was wearing off and the pain from the beating he’d taken from Schmidt was flowing back in. He made himself grip the yoke harder so he wouldn’t—

_let go_

—scratch the places where the spare Captain America suit was too ill-fitting. ‘And the second thing, when this is all over, can you talk to my sister? I want her to know her big brother didn’t abandon her. Can’t have her thinking that. And… help her make something of herself. She got all the brains in the family. Me, I got all the charm and the good looks.’ He heard Peggy let out a half-hearted chuckle at that. ‘She can really go places if she gets a break, but I won’t. I won’t be there to do that. And if you can. If you can…’

‘I will, Bucky. I promise.’

 _Keep looking for Steve_ , he almost added, but he knew he didn’t have to ask her that.

Below him the sea grew closer, closer, closer.

 _I’m going to die_. The thought was cool and alien. Everybody was going to die, he knew that, but he was going to die _today_. He was going to die _now_. Snow drifted in through the window. That made it right, somehow, as though everything since the train—the raid, stopping the little bomber planes, Schmidt vanishing into nothing, the borrowed suit, the borrowed shield sitting at his side—had just been some strange frostbite dream. Pictures in his head while he tumbled downwards and Steve lived, as it should have been.

It was right that it was going to end this way. Even if he was a coward and couldn’t stop himself from shaking.

The ocean filled the whole window now.

‘Peggy? You still there?’ He heard the tremor in his voice, blinked sweat off his eyes. His bladder felt suddenly very full.

‘I’m here, James.’ Was her voice tearful? He couldn’t tell. ‘I’m not going anywhere.’

‘I was wondering, do you have any funny st—’

He didn’t have time to think. He didn’t have time to be afraid. There was a roar of sound, splintering glass. The world was ripping in half. He closed his eyes, raised the shield in front of his face, purely on instinct.

There was a searing pain in his left side.

Then cold.

Then nothing.

 

**TBC…**

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Bucky’s various nicknames for the Red Skull and his near-reenactment of [a certain meme](http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/surprise-bitch) are without a doubt the artistic highlight of everything I’ve ever written. ;) I hope you enjoyed this chapter and that it piqued your interest for the rest of the story. I have story notes for the whole thing and a detailed outline for the next section, so hopefully I shouldn’t take too long to post the next few chapters. Thanks for reading!


	2. Ice

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I think it would be extremely unlikely for Bucky to have crashed the _Valkyrie_ in the exact same spot Steve did, which strikes me as a good segue to say the ripples from the Want of a Nail scenario start with this chapter’s first scene and will grow bigger and bigger as we get further into the story. Also, I know absolutely nothing about glaciology and am unlikely to ever have to learn (unless ice cancer ever becomes a thing, I guess) so, while I tried to do my research, I apologise in advance if this chapter totally murders the area of your expertise.

**02. _Ice_**

‘ _Show me the way to go home. I’m tired and I want to go to bed…_ ’

Wintering in the Arctic was, Maja decided, the worst thing ever invented by humans.

She made sure the third marker was driven all the way into the ice and felt for the guide rope with a mittened hand while she hummed the song into the bottom half of her hood. Her mother had shown her shark films when Maja had been an impressionable age.

After what felt like a hundred years of trudging through the Arctic night, she reached the GPR and promptly stubbed her toe on the machine, hard enough to hurt a little even with the reinforced boot. She grumbled and crouched by the device, the bulky layers of clothing getting uncomfortably in the way.

Summering in Antarctica had been a doodle. In Antarctica there had been a research station with real beds and central heating and potted plants instead of a ship where even the hot water was cold. There had been endless daylight.

There had been penguins.

‘ _I had a little drink ‘bout an hour ago and it’s gone right to my head…_ ’

Even inside the hood, she could barely hear herself over the knife edge of wind. Her mitten tapped the monitoring screen. The machine was, in theory, supposed to generate revolutionary new 3D ice shelf datasets. In real life, it had promptly turned out to spend half its time as a very large and very expensive paperweight and the other half requiring fussy and fiddly handling; sometimes duct tape was involved. She leaned a little closer. The GPR was rugged and bulky, its various control and readout screens narrow and nearly invisible inside their thick protective rims, even with the flashlight.

Maja stopped humming and started adjusting the machine’s settings. The readings they’d been getting over the ever-temperamental satellite uplink hadn’t been right, but the ones the machine was displaying right now were not even wrong. You couldn’t get that level of impedance, not on ice and—

She straightened up, wobbling a little in her snow boots. Her body felt the ice starting to crack underneath her before her ears did, but even so her legs weren’t fast enough. She started running, got caught in the guiding rope, and felt one of the marker poles come loose with a _twang_. It whistled past her as the ice opened up and she was engulfed by darkness and snow dust.

Her feet slammed against something and she stopped sliding down. Around her the ice settled. She could still feel little slivers of it on her face, even though she’d thought her skin was too numb for that. She took a deep breath, which was easier said than done through layers of thermal clothing, and tried to sit up.

At least all limbs and various bits seemed to be present and accounted for, and if she’d broken something, it was too cold for her to really feel it.

The flashlight was gone. She reached awkwardly into her vest with her bulky mitten and managed to pull out and activate one of her emergency flares. There was a fizz and a sudden burst of green light.

The good news was that the crevasse she had fallen into was only a couple of metres deep.

The weird news was that there was _something_ inside the ice, huge and dark, tinged an alien tint by the flare.

She knew she shouldn’t have watched _The Thing_ not long before coming, or indeed ever.

She hauled herself to her feet, as much as she could inside the narrow space that had just broken open in the ice sheet. In front of her the ice was nearly translucent, like a pane of wet glass, and she could see the metal shapes trapped inside. They were large enough to have cracked the ice as the glacial flow pushed them towards the surface.

This wasn’t an alien spaceship.

She edged her face close to the ice, until the tip of her nose was almost pressed against it.

‘Shitballs,’ she said.

In English.

***

Dark. Empty.

Then flashes of grey in the black.

Scraps of sound.

White light wounded his (whose?) eyes, tore into his head. Faces swam inside the fog. Shapes, fuzzy. Sounds, fuzzier.

His head flopped to one side. He saw something that could be an animal, or maybe some kind of machine, nestled against his left side, twitching, haloed with tubes and wires.

‘We’re losing him,’ a voice said, deep underwater. Something beeped insistently.

The fog thickened.

Darkness.

***

‘Captain? Captain, can you hear me?’

 _Captain? No, you’ve got the wrong guy_ —

He couldn’t speak, couldn’t even see. A heavy band tightened around his body. Soon it started to fade. He faded too.

Darkness.

***

The fog was lighter this time, the pain sharper. Bucky—

_Bucky yes that’s it_

—opened his eyes a fraction. A fraction was all he managed; his eyelids felt like slabs of concrete.

Needles. He felt them even before he saw them, even before the restraints bit into his flesh.

Burning liquid was seeping under his skin.

_No. I won’t let you! Won’t let you do it again!_ All that came out of his mouth was a whimper and drool. He tried to struggle, heard a snap of metal.

Darkness.

***

‘—geant, are you awake?’

 _No_. He didn’t manage to get the word out. His eyes were still closed, but he could sense light through his eyelids. He was somewhere where the air was warm, and there was the coolness of linen sheets against his skin. He could smell them, fresh laundry scent mixed with the hospital tang of antiseptic.

That made him almost bolt to his feet, but he forced himself to remain lying down. His stomach curdled with nausea. He managed to keep still.

_Steve. Did they find Steve?_

He couldn’t think about that now. He had to figure out where he was and how to get out of it. He rolled onto his side, pretending he was just now stirring awake. He couldn’t feel his left arm. He must have been sleeping on it, and in a minute it was going to sting with pins and needles.

‘It’s all right.’

He opened his eyes.

He was in a hospital room. No surprises there, that smell of soap and bleach and medicine had already told him so. Out of the window, he could see rows of buildings—was that Seventh? No, that wasn’t right—and soft music was playing on a radio, sprinkled here and there with static.

A nurse sat by his bed. The light inside the room wasn’t particularly strong and the sky outside was grey, but still her crisp white uniform and the glint of metal buttons made his eyes hurt.

‘How are you feeling, Sergeant?’ she asked.

‘Where am I?’ he said, as he rolled onto his back again. Let them think he didn’t know. His voice sounded hoarse; getting the words out was difficult.

‘You're in a hospital ward in New York,’ she said. Her accent was perfect, but her uniform was wrong, too crisp, too new. Not the kind of clothes someone worked in. ‘I’m afraid you were badly injured in the crash. Do you remember it at all?’

_Stall. Play for time._ ‘Yeah, I—’

He noticed it, then. It had been lying half under the sheets, so he hadn’t really seen it.

Not that there was anything to see. They had put him in a short-sleeved shirt and the hem of the left sleeve hung around nothing. Where his arm should be there was only empty space.

‘Oh God.’ He couldn’t help himself, even if he was trying to keep a cool front for these—Hydra?—goons. He sat up on the bed and pushed the sheets back with his right hand, as though that would expose the trick. It _was_ a trick, wasn’t it? He’d _felt_ his left arm when he’d been lying down with his eyes closed, was feeling it right now, a sort of numb weight, like when your foot went asleep, only multiplied a thousandfold. He touched the place where his left arm should be with his right hand, but his fingers closed on nothing.

_Captain_. Someone had called him Captain at some point, or had that just been a dream, or another trick? The suit—he’d been wearing the suit _(what did they do with the shield?)_ when he’d crashed, so maybe they’d thought—

‘It’s all right, Sergeant,’ said the fake nurse. ‘I know it must be frightening, but everything will be fine. Your left arm was severed in the crash. I’m sorry, there was nothing we could do.’

Her uniform wasn’t the only thing that was wrong. Everything in the room was suddenly too bright, too hard. Her lipstick looked like a smear of shiny red lacquer, the music and the static spilling from the radio blanketed his thoughts. It was making him nauseous again, or maybe it was that word, severed. _Severed_. He’d never noticed just how stomach-churning it sounded. His fingers felt inside the empty left sleeve, where there was just a nub below his shoulder, bulky with some kind of dressing.

The window. There was something wrong with that window...

The nurse leaned forward a little in her chair. ‘Sergeant, are you feeling all right? You’re still recovering from your injuries, so—’

‘Who are you really?’ he said, before he could think about it. Well, might as well get it over with.

_Severed._

She feigned confusion. ‘I don’t understand.’

He jumped out of the bed, so fast he made himself dizzy and she didn’t have time to react, or even to blink. He stumbled towards the window, his body thrown off balance by the absence of the arm.

‘Sergeant Barnes, please,’ the nurse said, and got to her feet. She was holding something tucked out of sight in her right hand. ‘You need to rest. You’re in no state to—’

He ignored her and looked out the window. If worst came to worst, he could always jump, height be damned.

Except there was no height. This wasn’t an ordinary window. Instead of a street there was a slab of dark floor, and the buildings were only a picture on a screen.

That was what had been wrong. There were no sounds, no city rumble, not even the rustle of a pigeon.

‘What the hell is—’ he started saying, but he didn’t manage to get the sentence out. His head swayed, fuller and fuller of all the things in the room, spots on the linoleum and chips on the enamel wash basin and the rumble of water in a pipe and that horrible disinfectant smell, but still he could see, despite the dizziness and the nausea he could _see_ , and what he could see was that something had been done to him. It wasn’t just the arm. He looked down at his body. He could tell, even with the hospital clothes. He was—not taller, but bigger, he was sure. Heavier.

_Needles_.

That… _thing_ , the squirming machine (animal?) lying where his arm had been. Had that been real?

‘Stay away from me,’ he said.

The fingers on her right hand moved. She must be holding some kind of radio device, because two men in uniforms he didn’t recognise came into the room, the bulk of holstered handguns at their sides.

Well, that sure made things nice and simple.

One of those wheeled curtain screens stood, folded up, between him and the hospital bed. Before the men could draw their guns, Bucky rushed forward and kicked the screen towards them. One of the metal rods hit the first man square on the side.

That wouldn’t hold them off, but it was just long enough for Bucky to brace his hand on the window sill and jump out.

He landed badly, went sprawling across the floor. The arm again—having to move without it was only slightly better than having to move with his legs tied together, or while wearing a blindfold. Even so, he managed to get to his feet before the armed men could reach him, and he raced across the backstage—or whatever this place was—and into a corridor outside.

A few of the people in the corridor were wearing lab coats. This must really be some kind of medical facility, then, but he didn’t have time to think about it. The woman’s voice sounded over a loudspeaker. ‘Code 13. All agents, Code 13.’

Whoever hadn’t noticed him bursting into the corridor noticed now. Before anyone could react, Bucky spun around, bumped against a wall as he was thrown off balance a little, and raced down the corridor, towards where there were the fewest people.

‘Sergeant Barnes! Sergeant Barnes!’

He ignored the voice shouting after him. Everybody here might be speaking with an American accent, but he remembered the needles, the straps holding him down while things were injected into his body. That told him all he needed to know.

He rammed into a man who went down in a flurry of papers, then slowed a fraction and tried to get his bearings. Exit. He had to find an exit. The loudspeaker was still blaring and he could hear the heavy tread of armed guards behind him. He ducked into another corridor.

This one didn’t have quite as much glass as the first. He spotted an exit sign on the ceiling, followed the arrow, and soon found a door marked _Fire Exit_. He pressed the push-bar with his hand. The metal bent a little.

A siren started wailing. He couldn’t afford to worry about it as he hurried into the passageway outside. The ground was cold and hard on his bare feet, but he didn’t slow down. He could see a street at the end of the passageway, cars speeding by. If he could get away, start figuring out where he was—

Even thrown off-balance, he was fast, faster than he’d ever been. He raced out into the street, then onto the tarmac. He couldn’t stop himself. A yellow cab swerved around him, almost clipping him, and honked furiously. More cars honked. He barely heard them, almost failed to notice the big black cars closing in on him. He was standing on a half-frozen puddle and the day was dim with cold, but he barely noticed that either.

He was in Times Square.

Or, at least, he was somewhere that could be Times Square. That was definitely the Knickerbocker Hotel, off to one end, and he was staring at a skyscraper that could only be the Times Building.

Only it was covered in giant, glowing signs saying things like KIA and YAHOO. He looked around. When his body stopped moving his head went on spinning, and spinning, and spinning.

It was too much. A river of shiny and sleek cars surrounded him. Engine sounds and exhaust and neon and lights and moving images filled his head. Something had been done to him (again) every bit as much as it had been done to this place he’d been to a thousand times. He could see the tiny rows of letters moving near the top of some of the giant signs, pick up on the conversation of a woman across the street talking to a box in her hand.

He was almost relieved when more armed and uniformed men spilled out of the cars boxing him in. He was sure blood was going to start trickling out of his ears and eyes and mouth if he didn’t have something to focus on, even if it was a fight.

But they didn’t fight him. Instead a man in a trench coat and an eyepatch strode towards him. ‘At ease,’ the man said, with a brief hand gesture.

He was talking to Bucky, but the armed men obeyed him too. Maybe Eyepatch was a military man, then. The Commandos were the only desegregated unit in the US Army as far as Bucky knew, and—if that didn’t say it all—they’d only been allowed that because they didn’t technically exist. But things changed, didn’t they? Why, the last time Bucky had stood here there hadn’t been all these little movies somehow playing on the billboards, or ads with women and men in their undies, all looking like they’d got their own dose of magic super-serum.

The observation wasn’t particularly funny, but he felt a peal of sickly-sweet laughter threaten to burst out of his mouth and had to press his lips together to keep it in. He was sure that if he started, he wasn’t going to be able to stop. ‘Who are you?’ he managed to say instead.

‘We’re US intelligence, Sargent,’ the man in the eyepatch said, then added, ‘look, I’m sorry for the little show back there.’ His voice was soothing, and none of it sounded like too much of a lie, which right now was enough to put him in Bucky’s good books. He just wanted to sit down, close his eyes, and put his head in his hands. Hand. He swallowed more jagged-edged laughter. Eyepatch went on. ‘Though it wasn’t all a show. You really are still recovering. Looks like you burst some of your stitches, too.’

Bucky looked down at where his left arm should be. The hem of the sleeve was speckled with blood. As if on cue, pain trickled back into his awareness, a hot pulse below his left shoulder, a cord wrapped tight around his head, even a dull ache in his bare feet. ‘What’s happened to me?’ he managed to get out. ‘What did you do?’

‘You lost your arm in the crash, Sergeant,’ the other man said, and took a step forward. Bucky felt himself tense, but remained still. ‘And afterwards, getting you out of your sleep... You were dying. We figured we had nothing to lose if we tried an experimental treatment. Guess it worked.’

‘Sleep,’ Bucky repeated.

The other man seemed to mistake it for a question. ‘Sorry. We were hoping to break all this to you slowly. You’ve been asleep for a long time, Sergeant. Almost seventy years.’

Some part of Bucky wasn’t terribly surprised by this. What other explanation could there be for... well, everything? Martians? Something in whatever drugs they’d given him, making him see things?

The rest of him found the number too big. Seventy years. It felt like being told the weight of the moon, or the distance to the sun. Just a bunch of digits.

He tried breaking it down.

It would make him almost 98.

Nothing.

2015\. That would mean it was almost 2015.

Still nothing.

His head was full of bright reds and neon blue and flashing lights. He felt his body sway again. The world around him see-sawed perilously.

The man with the eyepatch drew a little closer. ‘Are you feeling OK?’

‘Yeah. Never better. Just peachy,’ Bucky said, a split-second before his legs gave out and the tarmac rose up to meet him.

 

**TBC…**

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey, where’s that Well, Well, Well .gif when you really need it? ;) Anyway, I hope you enjoyed this chapter and that it whetted your appetite for the next one… The line about shark films is a reference to _Jaws_ , where _Show Me the Way to Go Home_ is famously used. Incidentally, regarding Bucky’s thoughts about racial segregation in the US armed forces back in the 40s, there are multiple modern comics showing Bucky as fairly clued-up (by mainstream comics standards, at least) on race issues, including back in the 40s, but I have to highlight this one mini-series called _Captain America: Forever Allies_. Admittedly because that comic could be summed up as Bucky Defeats the Villain By Being Incredibly Bendy and Obedient + Lots and Lots and Lots of Bucky Butt Poses (and Pecs-and-Butt Poses) + It Turns Out Nat’s Idea of Foreplay is Telling Bucky How Proud Steve Is of Him. But also because, among other things, there’s this one bit in which present-day Bucky thinks about how, back in WWII, the worst nickname he got was the best his team-mates  & friends Davy Mitchell (who was black, just to clarify for people not familiar with the comics) and Gwenny Lou Sabuki could hope to be called and, well, thank you, Perspective Man, you have saved the village! (But yeah, if you’re interested in reading a modern comic that tries to directly address the racism in the 40s comics, that’s one to check out. Also if you want to reach the conclusion that if the same lavish attention that’s paid to Bucky’s butt in that mini-series were channelled into RL problems, we’d all be living in a shiny utopia by now.)


	3. Sixty-Six

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, umm, it’s taken me a while to post this. First I was really busy at work, then I was on holiday and tried to get this done for **Meneldur** ’s birthday but instead ended up failing at that on every conceivable level, then I tried to post the chapter on the same day it’s set in but I had this horrible, two-weeks-long sinus infection, and then I was really busy at work again, and so here we are! Anyway, happy (incredibly, mind-bendingly belated) birthday to **Meneldur** , happy (also ridiculously belated) New Year to all my readers, and I hope you guys will enjoy this chapter. To make up for my tardiness, here’s [a picture of Bucky and Sam Cap wearing Santa hats](http://ic.pics.livejournal.com/overlithe/15266763/257622/257622_original.png), followed by [a picture of Bucky Cap and Natasha snowboarding on the shield](https://superherosquadonline.wikispaces.com/file/view/Captain_America_-_Ride_to_the_Rescue.png/280499858/Captain_America_-_Ride_to_the_Rescue.png). Yes, those are both official Marvel/Disney artwork, not fanart. I have literally nothing to add.

**03. _Sixty-Six_**

December 28 2011.

He had woken up on December 28 2011.

The first thing Bucky did once his mind was working again, or at least no longer spinning so much, was say ‘Steve?’

The man with the eyepatch was no longer there. Instead there was a gaggle of what Bucky supposed were doctors and nurses. People in white coats, at least. They had no answer for that question.

He sat up on the stretcher.

‘What day is it?’ That was the second thing he said, like a character in a cheesy flick.

They had an answer for that.

December 28 2011.

He tried to fit it into his head, but his thoughts were floating somewhere near the ceiling, and those three words were too big no matter how much he folded them up.

A wheelchair was brought to his side. ‘Thanks, but I still got both legs,’ he said, but it was no use. He was still rolled down to his new room through more glass corridors, the little crowd around him making it feel embarrassingly like a ticker tape parade.

2011.

Did they still have ticker tape parades in 2011?

It was like having to think through a fever. He might not have had much in the way of fevers since the things after Azzano, but he knew plenty about how to power through. One bit at a time, that was the secret.

So: December 28.

That part was a little hard, but doable. He’d closed his eyes—

_crash glass cold_

—in the _Valkyrie_ on May 6. He’d opened them again on December 28. Almost eight months, but that happened, didn’t it? He was sure people had been in comas for longer than that, and woken up and been none the worse for wear. Eight months, that wasn’t so bad. You had to have missed out on a lot, but you could catch up.

‘I know this must be really confusing,’ a white-coated man said, sounding like he was reading from a script. ‘We’ll just make sure all’s well and then you can get some rest. Director Fury made sure you won’t be disturbed.’

 _I think I’ve rested long enough, pal_ , Bucky thought, but said nothing, and remained silent and still on the bed while the doctors did things to him, as though his flesh and bones had turned to stone. He wasn’t ever going to like being poked and prodded by a doctor, but at least these introduced themselves (there were quite a few women doctors) and asked for his permission before they undid the buttons on his pyjama top, pulled away dressings, pressed rubber gloves and cold instruments to his flesh.

His dog tags sat on his bare chest, the metal as clean and fresh as the day he’d first put them on.

It was only he who was different. A little bigger. More solid. Maybe stronger all the time, now.

 _We tried an experimental treatment_ , the eyepatch man—Director Fury?—had told him.

Was it the serum? The same thing they’d given to Steve?

He looked away from the ripple of muscle. His gaze fell on the nub remaining below his left shoulder, where a doctor was touching swollen, purple flesh. He’d seen and dressed plenty of wounds, had even pulled almost a foot of shrapnel off his leg once and been none the worse for wear, but now he was light-headed with nausea. He ended up staring at a big empty black frame on the wall while his wound was restitched and redressed and the doctors talked among themselves as though he were as inconsequential as a wooden dummy.

2011\. Sixty-six years. 3432 weeks. 24106 days.

Plus seven months and twenty-two days. _Mustn’t forget those_. He swallowed another bout of rusty-nail laughter.

‘Any discomfort?’

He turned towards the voice. ‘No,’ he said, the word slurred. ‘Not really.’ (Not the kind they were asking about.) His gaze drifted back towards the room, without him meaning it to. He still saw sharper, better, but the colours no longer hurt his eyes and his brain so much.

Now it was only numbers gnawing away at the spot behind his right temple.

December 28—

‘Tingling?’

‘No.’

He tried stuffing his thoughts back in his head. _I’m in the future_. The words felt like someone else had scribbled them behind his eyes. He didn’t see the future, just off-white walls and glass. Through the window he could see high-rises, steel and light in the darkening fog.

‘Numbness?’

 _Everywhere_. ‘No.’

‘Pain?’

He felt his tongue go slack. His left arm—the place where his left arm used to be—was a ragged red net of pain. They had lied to him, he was sure. The limb hadn’t been severed clean; it had been ripped off, like a fly’s wing.

‘A little,’ he ended up saying, even though he knew it was a trick.

There was another needle after that, pushed into the soft flesh in the crook of his arm, and he had to look away again, focus on a rubbery thumping he was sure no one else was picking up on, one of the doctors nervously scuffing the tip of his shoe on the floor.

It was just the one needle, too. So not that mean a trick. Not like when—

‘This should help with the pain,’ one of the lady doctors said. ‘Let us know if it doesn’t work.’

Another outside thought: _they don’t know how_ you _work_.

He pretended to yawn, then wasn’t pretending at all. ‘Sorry. Getting real tired now.’ He tried to make it sound as smooth and friendly as he could, but he seemed to have lost the knack, as though it had—

_been severed_

—withered away in the ice.

It didn’t matter. Smooth or clunky, it seemed to work.

‘Just press the call button if you need anything,’ the same woman doctor said as she placed a squat white wand on the bed. ‘Anything at all.’ While she spoke, another doctor fastened some kind of weird watch around Bucky’s wrist.

‘This will let us make sure everything’s all right without it getting in the way,’ the second doctor said as he finished placing the shackle. He was smiling. They were all smiling as they stepped out of the room, but they were the kind of smiles that didn’t reach their eyes.

There was a soft click as the last doctor closed the door behind her.

Left him alone in his 21st century cage.

***

_Director Fury. US intelligence. Experimental treatment. 28 Dec 2011_. He was still light-headed, the thoughts bouncing around inside his skull like rubber balls. He rubbed his eyes until he saw big dark splotches, then slipped out of the bed.

As cages went, Bucky had to admit this was probably the cushiest he’d ever been in. There was a strange but not unpleasant smell clinging to everything (he was starting to think of it as the 2011 smell), but the floor was covered in thin yet soft carpet, and the room was warm and full of fading winter light.

He swayed a little on his feet, balled his hand into a tight fist to help himself focus.

There was a nightstand next to the bed, a tray with some glasses and a pitcher of water. Seeing it made him suddenly parched, and he drank straight from the pitcher, even while some little part of him kept wondering if there was something in the water.

When he set the pitcher down, it was two-thirds empty.

‘First drink in seventy years. I got thirsty,’ he said out loud, and then was glad when he hiccuped instead of laughing.

 _Pull yourself together, man_. His head still throbbed. He stepped to the foot of the bed, grabbed the bakelite railing, and pulled. The bed—a big, heavy hospital bed—rose a few inches off the floor. He held it for several seconds, then let it drop to the floor with a loud thud. His muscles ached and he was sure he’d managed to put something in his left shoulder even more out of whack, but it had been no harder than lifting a sack of potatoes.

Well, he hadn’t expected anything else, had he? So what was the point of standing here gawking about it?

A set of doors in one of the walls opened into a closet full of clothes and footwear. He didn’t need to try them on to know they were all his size. Another door, next to one of the windows, led to an enormous bathroom full of dark tiles and gleaming chrome and glass.

A mirror took up almost a whole wall. He stood in front of it, studying his reflection as though there would be some clue in it that would snap everything back into place.

His eyes were a little bloodshot and he needed a shave, but all he could focus on was the empty sleeve. It remained at his side as he raised his right hand, and he thought of a funhouse mirror, one that made him look lopsided, unfinished. There was an intense itch where his left arm should be.

Enough. His mug wasn’t that interesting.

Moments later, he managed to soak his pyjamas when he discovered that the shower worked with the press of a button, and he was sure he spent an embarrassingly long amount of time staring at the tap above the sink and its seemingly infinite supply of hot water.

(Taking a whizz in the 21st century was much the same as always. There was that, at least.)

Back inside the bedroom, he looked at the couch and the two chairs, then at the heater that was as sleek and thin as everything else in the future. There was a chest of drawers, empty, and on the bedside table a skinny black oblong sat on a small stand. The object had a number pad, which at first made him think it was some kind of radio device, but once he examined the symbols on the buttons, he realised this must be a telephone.

He couldn’t suppress a dart of elation. He could call—

Who?

His right hand bumped against his left hip. He’d been trying to scratch his wrist, he realised.

He had—he’d had a small birthmark just above his left wrist. He swallowed, pushed the memory away ( _why the hell did you think about that anyway?_ ) and picked up the other thing on the nightstand. He wondered if this was another glossy black telephone—maybe people in the 21st century had two, to go with their moon cities—but other than the numbers and the pluses and minuses, there weren’t any symbols he recognised. Well, there was a larger red button. He was sure _something_ would happen if he pressed that. Things couldn’t change that much in sixty-six years, he thought as he pushed it.

‘—develops in Indonesia.’

He spun towards the voice, hand raised and half-curled into a fist, then promptly felt his face heat up with embarrassment. He was still alone. The thing he’d taken for an empty frame had come to life and filled with moving pictures, like a miniature movie screen. Two people sat at a desk with a stylised world map behind them. A news ticker scrolled away at the bottom. It was evening on December 28 2011, like he’d been told.

He swallowed again. This time he was sure he could feel a trace of sourness left behind by the water.

It wasn’t a lie, or a dream. December 28 2011, sixty-six years, New York of the future, all of it. He’d never thought so, not really. Dreams didn’t smell like this, and it was all both too elaborate and too straightforward to be a lie.

It was just that seeing that date and time on the screen, the seconds ticking forward, the words saying things he only half understood, made it fully real, somehow, like a—

_fall snow_

—stamp on a death certificate.

His head swam as though he’d just downed a whole bottle of whisky in one go. He closed his eyes tight, managed to remain upright.

‘—with a special report on the risks of anti-ageing treatments, after the break.’

When he opened his eyes again, an animated logo was moving on the screen, in time with some fast-paced music. Bucky placed the controller on the bed, then leaned towards the glass screen until he could feel faint waves of heat radiating from it. A lifetime, two lifetimes ago, he and Steve had seen a television exhibit at Stark's Expo, but even that futuristic display hadn’t been nowhere near this life-like, and the chunky electronics would never have fit into this slender frame. He ran his thumb over the lower edge of the television device. On a corner there was a logo saying Stark Industries.

He straightened up. On the screen, a woman was smiling so hard at toothpaste that Bucky was sure the tube must either have pep pills or the big prize-draw numbers. How old was Stark? He must be almost a hundred by now. He—

He’d turned to his right, to ask Steve if he knew when Stark had been born.

‘Goddammit.’ He couldn’t help but wish he was still holding the control pad just so he could throw it on the bed, even though he knew that would be utterly childish.

The other door. Maybe it was time to try that.

First, though, he ripped away the thing on his wrist, and couldn’t help but be a little surprised when it didn’t start beeping.

He walked to the door, tried the handle, felt the metal bend a little, and weakened his grip. He might be stronger all the time now, but he still wasn’t sure how much.

The handle turned and the door opened a crack, with no resistance. No alarm sounded as he stepped outside. Guards didn’t swarm the corridor. He picked up his pace, walking towards where he could hear faint noises, then slowed to a stop.

Where was he going to go?

He wasn’t a prisoner, or at least he hadn’t been treated like one. He had some kind of value to these people, he knew, but he didn’t think they would strap him down to a bed if he asked to leave the building. They would probably take him to wherever he asked to go.

He could walk around Manhattan.

He could go to Brooklyn, and wander through streets he knew full of buildings he didn’t.

Full of strangers.

He could pick up the phone and try to work out how to get the operator and ask for the Stark Industries number. Maybe he’d manage to talk to a secretary, or a robot secretary, whatever they had in the 21st century, and explain he was an old acquaintance of Mr Howard Stark’s. It’s a funny story. What a laugh that would be. Good times.

The ache in his wound had ebbed away a little, but now it itched more furiously than ever. The rest of his skin felt too tight. He wanted to move, to run until he dropped to the ground and didn’t have to think anymore.

He wasn’t a prisoner. He just had seventy years of bars around him. Couldn’t even hope for a passing ship, send a message in a bottle.

Instead of running he walked back into the room, sat on the bed, and stared at the future.

***

He was walking through a snow-covered field, towards the mission objective. Steve was a few feet ahead of him, the shield on his back slick with frost.

He saw the hole in front of them, half-hidden in the blanket of snow, but it was very important that they keep going. He knew everything depended on it.

‘Watch out,’ Bucky said, but the words didn’t make it out of his mouth.

Steve lay on his back at the bottom of the hole, eyes open into the sky.

‘I’ll get you out of there.’

Instead Bucky’s hands pushed fistfuls of snow into the hole, until there was only white.

***

He woke up with a strangled gasp. Something was on his mouth. He struck at the thing with his left fist, didn’t feel the blow land, then tried to bat it away with this right hand.

A pillow. He was struggling with a pillow.

_Since when do we—_

_Get up_. They were supposed to intercept Zola’s train and time was a-wasting.

‘Man, I had the weirdest…’

… _dream_.

He bolted up, head snapping towards his right, where Steve should be, and where of course he wasn’t. For a moment Bucky felt his thoughts writhe, like cut live cables, then his mind settled. He was in a room in New York.

It was 2011.

His left arm hadn’t fallen asleep, it had been chopped off when he’d crashed a Hydra bomber.

He’d been on ice.

He’d killed his best friend.

He scrunched his eyes shut, trying to squeeze away the thoughts and the remnants of some dream he could barely remember (there was a dim image of Steve lying down, not fighting back or mouthing off, which made it a dream for sure). His tongue felt like it was covered in fur and even though the shot had dulled the pain in his arm, now it was back with a vengeance, a sharp-toothed thing clamping its fangs on the stump.

A cold hook of fear inside his chest: what if he’d slept for another seventy years? But no, he was being stupid. He’d just dozed off for moments, he was sure. The television screen was still glowing, now showing some woods. He fished the control pad from the end of the bed and pressed the red button, turning the screen black and silent again.

He remembered now: after he returned to the room he’d fiddled with the control pad, moving by trial and error until he figured out how to change the station. Then he’d kept doing it until the heat and the too-soft bed had made him drift off to sleep for a few moments, without him realising or wanting it. That was what had happened, he was sure. He remembered watching a bit of something called _Toddlers & Tiaras_, and there was no way he could have made that up.

Well, he didn’t want to stay in bed, that much he knew. He peeled off his sweat-sticky clothes, which was easier said than done with just one arm, then made his way into the science shower, where he stood under icy water for as long as he could without getting the bandages wet. He wasn’t surprised when he stepped back onto the tiles and found out that the towel sitting on the railing was already warm. In the last twelve hours and change he’d learnt that the people from the 21st century liked electricity and lights and heat (a lot); that they had hundreds of television stations, one of which seemed to be entirely about the weather (perhaps there was more of it these days); and that they didn’t like clocks (not one bit).

Getting some clothes on with just the one hand was even harder than getting them off. He ended up having to sit on the edge of the bed and wriggle his way into a pair of trousers, and he picked the sweater and the shoes based on the fact that they had no buttons or laces.

This late at night, the corridors were lit only by a weak, ghostly glow. He wandered deeper into the building, more or less at random. The signs on the doors were useless; they all said things he knew nothing about.

He didn’t know how long it took for him to end up in what he was sure was the same glass-fronted corridor he’d run through during his inglorious escape into Times Square. He edged close to the cold-rimmed panes, and looked out at the ribbon of city unspooled in front of him. Seventh Avenue, familiar buildings wedged like old scars between glowing, five-storey-high billboards, symbols and words he’d never seen before.

There were Christmas lights. He’d forgotten it was just three days after Christmas.

An endless flow of traffic moved up and down the avenue, the faint rumble seeping in through the glass. If he closed his eyes he could pretend he was back where he should be, and that everything was just as he’d left it.

Except for the itch where his left arm had been, which was starting to make the pain feel good in comparison. He knew if he started scratching, he would probably rip right through the skin. He ended up balling his hand so tightly his nails dug into his palm and he was sure he could feel the bones crack.

Man, he really needed a smoke.

Or a drink.

Hard liquor sounded like the better option right now.

The footfalls drawing closer to him were faint, but still he picked them up. He kept looking at the city until a voice sounded out.

He’d heard it twice now, which counted as familiar in the future. Good. Familiar was good.

‘Couldn’t sleep?’

Bucky turned around. The man with the eyepatch— _Director Fury_ , Bucky corrected himself—was still wearing the same trench coat as before. He didn’t look like he’d changed his clothes, but neither did he look rumpled or tired. Bucky couldn’t help but wonder if he actually slept.

‘Something like that,’ Bucky said, then let a second drip by before he asked ‘did you find Steve?’

‘I should have introduced myself before.’ He took a couple of steps towards Bucky and held out one hand. ‘Nick Fury, Director of the Strategic Homeland Intervention, Enforcement, and Logistics Division. S.H.I.E.L.D. for short. Back in the day, it was the SSR.’

Bucky shook his hand. ‘James Barnes, but you knew that already, sir.’

‘Nick is fine. So is Director Fury. Care to join me for a cup of coffee?’

As if on cue, Bucky’s stomach knotted painfully. He was suddenly ravenously hungry, but he supposed coffee would have to do. ‘Sure.’ He paused for a few moments as he followed Fury. ‘If this used to be the SSR—’

‘You’re going to ask me about Agent Carter, unless I’m mistaken.’

He didn’t sound like the kind of man who made many mistakes, Bucky thought, but said nothing.

‘I know you worked with her,’ Fury went on. ‘And she was one of our founders. Along with General—sorry, it was Colonel Phillips back then. And Howard Stark.’

Bucky didn’t reply, but he couldn’t help but feel a little dash of reassurance. It wasn’t exactly like coming across an old friend, but he supposed this was as close as it got in the future.

_Not all old friends._

_Shut up._

Fury led him into a lift—glass and steel and glowing buttons, like everything else—that whisked them towards the top of the building. He glanced away from his own reflection.

‘Did you?’ Bucky said. He couldn’t help himself. ‘Find Steve?’

‘You were the only one we found in the bomber wreckage.’

‘So you were looking for him.’

There was a ding and the lift doors opened. Fury said nothing as he walked them into an office and directed Bucky to a low sofa with a gesture. This was another 21st century room, where most of the walls were glass and there was a small sculpture on a desk that Bucky didn’t really understand. That was more Steve’s—

‘How do you take your coffee, Barnes?’

Bucky looked down at the tray where a coffeepot was filling the air with bittersweet steam, then at the solitary hand lying on his knee. Fury was being kind, he knew. ‘Sugar, milk, and cream, please.’ It made him sound like a kid, but right now he could down the whole little ceramic jug of milk in one go, eat spoonfuls of cream, tip the sugar bowl into his mouth. He hoped his stomach wouldn’t start rumbling. ‘And everybody calls me Bucky.’

Fury spoke again as he poured the coffee. ‘The official story is that Captain America was presumed killed in action during a raid on a Hydra base in the Austrian Alps. An experimental bomber plane was taken down. The mission cost the lives of both Captain Steve Rogers and his second-in-command, Sergeant James Barnes. It saved the lives of millions. Probably avoided turning another few weeks of war into another few decades. We won, by the way.’

Bucky picked up his cup. It burned his fingers, and the liquid was scalding, but he still took a sip. It tasted good, even that hot. ‘I figured.’

‘I don’t suppose anyone’s said thank you yet.’

He couldn’t help but be a little startled. All he’d done was remain in the pilot’s seat in the _Valkyrie_. So all he’d done was nothing, really. In the most literal sense. ‘Anyone would have done the same.’

‘Would they?’

Fury’s eye was unblinking, and Bucky found his own gaze drifting towards the city. This high up he could see grids of lights, beacons shining close to the clouds, the Blackwell’s Island Bridge stretching above the East River. Manhattan, the same yet wholly different, off like spoilt milk. He drank another mouthful of coffee, and felt it settle in his stomach like a ball of lead. ‘Is there an unofficial story?’

‘The SSR sent a search and rescue team to a gorge in the Austrian Alps in May 1945.’ Fury set his cup down and steepled his fingers. ‘Twice. Another team was sent in June. Then another operation in 1946. And 1949. They all found nothing. A body was never recovered.’

‘So…’ He wasn’t going to say anything else, and he knew it. He hadn’t really realised how big a few words could be. _They all found nothing. Never recovered. 28 December 2011._

‘I know it’s a lot to take in.’ Fury’s voice had turned just a fraction softer. Bucky had known him for only a few hours—a few minutes, really—but he was still sure that didn’t happen often. ‘For us, it’s history. For you, it just happened. And when you were found…’

_No, you don’t understand_ , Bucky thought. _Sometimes I told him he was going to get himself killed one of these days, but someone who’d say ‘Don’t let me catch you here again’ through a black eye and a split lip can’t just_ die _, OK? Just slip. Just fall_. And then, right after, like a sliver of ice, _I was wearing the suit_. A memory floated up: someone calling him Captain. ‘Did you think I was him?’ 

‘We thought it was possible,’ Fury said. ‘A lot of secrets get buried in seventy years.’

‘Is that when you gave me the serum?’ An alarm— _Christ, shut up_ —sounded inside his mind, reminding him that he was a soldier, that he understood the chain of command, that even he knew when to shut his goddamn trap. It didn’t matter. He couldn’t stop himself. ‘When you realised I wasn’t Steve?’ 

Fury cocked his eyebrow. ‘The super-soldier serum? We don’t have it. Nobody managed to recreate it.’

It was true, and Bucky knew it. If they could make an army of super-soldiers, why bother digging up a cripple from the ice? Why not put him back when they realised he wasn’t who they wanted?

Another flash: a machine, hooked up where his left arm should be. He wasn’t sure if it was a dream or a memory. ‘You did something to me. I’m faster. Stronger. I…’ He could feel his fingers tightening around the cup, and stopped himself just before he shattered it to pieces. ‘Zola. He was a Hydra scientist.’ The taste of coffee in his mouth turned to bile, but he managed to carry on. It was the way Fury’s face was still as a statue’s, his expression blank. It made the words slide out a little more easily. ‘Two ye—back in ’43, the 107th got captured in Northern Italy. We got sent to a labour camp, a factory. Zola was there. He’d set up this ward and they let him do experiments. You couldn’t work anymore, off you went. And I—he gave me something. I guess whatever he gave me must have mixed with what you gave me.’ He fell silent, looked at the empty cup in his hand, where the coffee’s dregs looked like a black and lidless eye. Wherever Zola was, he must be laughing.

‘We’re familiar with Zola’s work for Hydra,’ Fury said. ‘And the report on the Kreischberg raid did mention that Rogers found you in a medical ward. There weren’t a lot of details.’

 _Thank God for that_. He hadn’t told anyone about what had happened, about the changes afterward, not even Steve, but during the things after Azzano, he had sometimes drifted up from the restraints and the fire and the sharp instruments, and seen Zola scribbling away in a notebook, seemingly unbothered by the noise. He looked up again. ‘Why am I really here, Director Fury?’

If Bucky’s question surprised him, Fury gave no signs of it. He just seemed to hesitate for a split-second, then stood up and walked towards one of the walls. ‘You weren’t the only thing we found in the wreckage.’ Bucky followed him. ‘Open storage C,’ Fury added, but before Bucky could try to understand what the other man was saying, one of the walls slid open.

He would like to think he was surprised, angry—anything at all—when he saw the white star, the red and blue looking like fresh varnish under the subdued light.

But he wasn’t. He felt nothing.

‘No,’ he said. It came out in a whisper. He cleared his throat, repeated himself. ‘No. Not going to do that. Sorry,’ he added, and knew the apology didn’t sound even a little bit sincere.

Some part of him expected Fury to react like one of his old drill sergeants, or Colonel Phillips, at least. Instead Fury’s expression remained unchanged, and when he spoke again his voice was as smooth as ever. ‘I think you should know what’s on the table before you say no to it.’

‘I know I was wearing a spare Cap outfit when you found me. I know you noticed how I… changed, and now you’re showing me the shield. And I know I’m not Steve. I’m not gonna put on his costume and pretend to be him.’

‘I’m not asking you to,’ Fury said. Bucky didn’t look at him; his eyes stung, and he was afraid of what the other man would see in them. ‘You know, I’ve been reading up on you since we found you. You don’t strike me as the kind of man who likes getting benched.’

 _Cap, if you think you’re putting me on the bench again_ — He dug his fingers into his palm again to push the memory away, but instead saw snowflakes falling on metal. A gloved hand, slipping? Opening? Slipping. Opening. Letting go.

Not millions of lives. Just one. _Just one, you goddamn jerk._

He felt hollow, everything under the skin scooped out, and even though he didn’t really notice it, he must have swayed on his feet a little, because Fury’s hand reached out halfway to him, as though Bucky looked about to spill on the floor again.

‘Are you—’

‘I’m fine,’ Bucky said, face hot with shame. ‘Just… I—I thought we’d won the war. Can’t see why you need a one-armed man in a star-spangled outfit.’

The corner of Fury’s mouth twitched a little, and Bucky couldn’t tell if he was angry or amused. He sounded like neither. ‘We won _a_ war. It turns out the world doesn’t have any fewer threats than when you were last in it.’ He paused for a second. ‘Look, I’m not your superior officer.’

Maybe it would be easier if he were, Bucky thought. Easier to just serve, to have orders to follow. To have his thoughts drift away, unneeded and unwanted.

‘And I’m not your jailer either,’ Fury went on. ‘S.H.I.E.L.D. is about protecting people. I just think you’d rather be keeping the world safe than losing yourself in it.’

‘I know I don’t want to be Cap.’

‘Maybe you don’t have to be.’

Bucky was confused for a few moments. The air might be cooler here, but the inside of his head was still sticky. ‘You want to study me,’ he finally said. This time his stomach clenched with nausea, not hunger. ‘See if you can make… others.’

Fury was unperturbed. ‘Like I said, S.H.I.E.L.D. is about protecting people.’

He didn’t answer. Instead he looked at the shield again, at the empty space behind it where Steve should be. The thought of anyone else wielding it, even touching it, was unbearable, and he knew that was petty and childish and just plain _dumb_.

But he couldn’t help it. He couldn’t help but feel the thought was all those things, and yet also right.

He saw his hand move towards the shield and did nothing to stop it. The metal was cool but not cold and when he hoisted it up by the rim it was lighter than he remembered, two days and sixty-six years ago. Maybe it was just that he was stronger now. _Yeah, too little too late, buddy_. The though settled in his throat like a chunk of jagged blade, but it didn’t stop him from grabbing one of the straps on the back of the shield.

He was sure that if he slipped the shield onto his arm, it would fit better now.

He had to bite his tongue, hard enough to draw blood, to stop himself from laughing (crying?). It was starting to become a habit.

Fury’s voice would have startled him if his senses hadn’t picked up on the other man approaching before his brain did. ‘Listen, you don’t have to do anything right now.’ He was holding a file. Bucky wondered how he was going to grab it, but Fury didn’t hand it to him. ‘Have some breakfast. Get some rest. You heal fast, but you still need to recover from the crash. It should give you some time to think about what you want to do.’

‘What’s in the file?’

Fury blinked once before answering. ‘Some of what you missed out on.’

‘My—I had a family,’ Bucky said. ‘Do you know…’

‘We can track them down for you,’ Fury said, before Bucky had to finish the sentence.

Neither of them spoke for a moment. Bucky felt his hand tighten on the strap. The shield brushed his leg. He was starting to grow used to the weight. Fury’s expression was blank again, his gaze knowing.

 _You should have left me in the ice_ , Bucky wanted to say, but instead he looked down at the shield. ‘Can I keep it with me?’

It wasn’t really a question.

 

**TBC…**

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The bit with Bucky being irrationally annoyed at the thought of someone else touching the shield references something interesting in both Cap movies: obviously lots of people bounce off the shield/get the shield lobbed at them, etc, but if you look carefully, only Steve and Bucky actually handle the shield. Even in the bit in CA:TFA where Steve sees the shield for the first time, Howard doesn’t touch it, even tough it would be perfectly unremarkable for him to hand it to Steve. In contrast, Bucky has wielded it three times now, which I’m hoping is not-terribly-subtle foreshadowing…
> 
> The line _Cap, if you think you’re putting me on the bench again_ comes from the _Captain America: Super Soldier_ game, which is set during CA:TFA. I actually recommend checking it out if you’re interested in seeing more of the Howling Commandos’ dynamics, plus quite a few of the actors (Chris Evans, Sebastian Stan, Hayley Atwell, etc) reprise their roles, and there’s some nice bits of foreshadowing (plus a scene that is pretty much the definition of Harsher in Hindsight). You can see all the cut-scenes edited together [here](http://youtu.be/XvHIc2P_xUE) (the line I quoted happens around 54:00, and Steve has a speech I love right after), and there’s quite a few full-length play-throughs on YouTube if you’re interested.


	4. World of Tomorrow

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry, I seem to find myself apologising for the delay in getting chapters up quite a lot lately! My excuse this time is not actually that I was doing victory laps over Markus and McFeely confirming my Zola timeline in _Wasp Harvest_ as being pretty much canon. I mean, obviously I was doing that ;) but I have also been working on a bunch of kink meme prompts. I wanted to finish them before this chapter, but then I decided anyone who’s reading this has probably waited long enough, so once again I apologise for this chapter being so late and I hope you’ll enjoy it now that it’s finally up!

**04. _World of Tomorrow_**

He did have breakfast, like Director Fury had suggested, though Bucky found it easier to think of it as a command. He didn’t have to send for it, though: some time after he returned to his room and sat and stared at the shield, burnished by the rising dawn, a man in a black G-man suit wheeled in a trolley, the kind you could fit handily onto a bed. The smell of melting butter and sugar wafted across the room, making Bucky’s stomach feel like a gaping hole in his midsection.

‘I—’ he started to say, then stopped. The man stood still by the trolley. If he was curious, he disguised it well. ‘Thank you,’ Bucky ended up saying instead. He knew that if he started with the questions he’d never stop.

Worse, he also knew that he had no idea about where to even begin. He was surrounded by threads to pull on. ‘You know, I could get used to this,’ he said, rather limply.

It was a lousy joke, but happily the man in the suit pretended not to hear it. ‘You’re welcome, sir,’ he said, and left.

 _How’s this for a joke, pal_ , Bucky thought as pulled the tray into position above the mattress, his motions jerky without the left arm to balance them. _How are you going to eat this stuff one-handed?_

He looked at the spread in front of him and hunger gnawed any other thoughts away. There was coffee, tea, a bottle of milk, a jug of something he could swear was orange juice, fresh-squeezed. A huge pile of toast sat on a plate, crowned with a big pat of butter, the real thing, filling his nose with the scent of salt and cream and looking impossibly rich. Another plate held a mountain of scrambled eggs, a third a herd of something he took a few seconds to recognise as tiny cheeses, some of them the kinds he’d only seen in Europe. There were two translucent tubs with two varieties of what he thought were wheat flakes, little containers of jam and honey and yet more butter, a small tray laden with pastries. The smell of vanilla, chocolate and caramelised sugar made his mouth water so much he was sure he moaned a little, and what was more, he didn’t feel even a bit embarrassed. Off to one side, next to cutlery and paper napkins and a handful of small packets, sat a big bowl of fruit. Fresh fruit, not dried, glistening under the ceiling lights. He recognised apple slices, orange segments, and grapes, wondered briefly if it was only S.H.I.E.L.D. who got these big fat juicy strawberries in December, and realised he had no idea about some of the other stuff in the bowl: green slices dotted with seeds, pale orange squares, yellow triangles.

He thought he’d known what hunger was after—

_after Azzano_

—doing things like tailing an armed convoy for three days straight with a single K-ration in his stomach, that he’d known what it was like to have a craving after weeks eating only stuff that was dry, came from cans, or was one of Stark’s bars of an allegedly food-like substance.

But now, as he popped one of the yellow fruit triangles into his mouth and felt the juice, sweet and sour, well on his tongue as he chewed, he was finding out how wrong he’d been. _First bite of the future_ , he thought, and soon he wasn’t thinking at all, just figuring out that if he wedged a plate against heavier stuff it wouldn’t scoot away from him too much as he did his best to cut stuff one-handed without bending the knife, that right now he didn’t mind spills and crumbs and getting his hand as grubby as a little kid having a go at his first bowl of soup, that he felt very little shame as he wedged one of the jam containers between two fingers, managed to peel the metallic lid off with his thumbnail, and licked the contents clean.

When he was done he looked down at the mess on the tray. He’d eaten everything, drunk everything, so fast his mouth was smeared with salt and grease and he was just a little bit out of breath.

He still felt like he could pack in half a roast chicken. A whole pound cake.

_Man, no wonder you eat for three. Is this what it felt like at fi—_

He forced himself to look back at the tray. He’d turned to his right, to talk to Steve again. The words had been about to spill out of his mouth.

That was another thing he found out, over the next two days: that he couldn’t stop himself from doing that, just like he couldn’t stop the jab of pain that always came afterwards, always fresh, always sharp.

He found out that time worked differently in the future, that hours would both stretch out like pulled taffy and fly by in an eye-blink. In the war he’d learned plenty about how time could squeeze into nothing or stretch into forever, but he didn’t know it could do both at once. Maybe he’d lost his sense of time like he’d lost the arm, the same way some guys went home with their sense of balance shot to hell or black holes torn in their eyesight from a bit of shrapnel in their heads.

He found out how to shave one-handed. There was a can in the bathroom that squirted out a gel that somehow swelled into shaving cream. After he read the instructions carefully it only took him a couple of tries to hold the can between his knees, work the pump with his thumb while his fingers collected the blobs of gel, lather up his face, wash the hand, put the can back on the sink, and pick up the razor.

(Tying shoelaces was a different story. He tried folding himself up so he could hold one end of the shoestring with his teeth and another with his fingers, but after several moments of fumbling and slippage, he spat out the shoelace with a grumbled _oh for the love of_ , let himself flop back onto the bed, and half-chuckled half-hiccupped until his stomach ached.)

He found out that the pain in the stump that’d taken the place of his left arm flowed and ebbed like a tide, but the doctors always came back before it got too bad, to give him pills that dulled it, to poke at him and the stitches and ask him questions. _How are you? Fine. You heal much faster than the average person._ Nod. _We’re still figuring out your dosage, so let us know if something feels wrong. Sure._ He found out that the pain might shrink to a dull grinding but the itching wouldn’t go away, that even after two days he still woke up feeling his left arm lying against his side, bruised and numb, that he was sure he would still feel it after two years, after two decades.

Two centuries.

He found out that no matter how many different television stations he tried to watch, no matter how many hours he spent poring over the newspapers that were brought to him along with his meals, he was never going to catch up, like a stranger overhearing an argument between an old married couple, or someone who’d wandered into a movie theatre when the picture was about to end.

And to think he used to love stories about inventions, about how life would be like in the year 2000, about space ships and cities on the moon. What a chump.

He found out he needed to sleep even less than after the things after Azzano. That was good. He couldn’t really remember his dreams, but he knew they were sticky and sharp-toothed.

On the third day—the 31st—a dark-haired woman stepped in after a knock on the door. Bucky set his newspaper down. He’d been reading a story about tablets, and apparently they were neither the kind that were made of stone nor the kind you swallowed.

‘Sorry to disturb you, Sergeant Barnes. No, don’t get up.’

He wondered if you kept your rank when you spent seventy years (sixty-six years seven months twenty-five days) on ice, then glanced at the shield propped up on the other chair. Fury had been right about war, but Bucky hadn’t needed to learn anything about the 21st century to know that. He’d fought in one; that usually did the trick.

He did get up, just as she said ‘I’ve got those files you asked for.’ She was holding a stack of manila folders, which she then placed on the chest of drawers.

‘Thanks,’ he said. ‘I appreciate it.’ She lingered in place for a few seconds, and he couldn’t help but think about how small the pile looked. His friends. His family. They all fit into a tidy little stack. ‘Do you work with Director Fury?’ he asked, before she had enough time to turn around.

She stood a little straighter, and her stance and the way she was staring at some point beyond his left shoulder made him wonder if she’d served. ‘For some years now,’ she said.

‘He wants me to work for him too,’ Bucky said. ‘For… S.H.I.E.L.D., I guess.’

Her gaze remained steady. ‘It must be hard, losing seventy years,’ she said, and Bucky couldn’t help but flinch a bit, inside, where she couldn’t see. He told himself that the reason why he hadn’t left his rooms since his conversation with Fury was because he didn’t really see the point, but he knew the real reason was that he didn’t think he could bear any more people looking at him, probably being curious or pitying or, worst of all, admiring. He knew he was being ungrateful, and probably a big old coward to boot, but he couldn’t help himself.

Wouldn’t even be the first time he was a coward, now would it?

But instead of offering commiseration or understanding, the woman just went on. ‘Director Fury always knows what he’s doing. And he never forgets who he’s doing it for. I think that’s something worth considering. It was nice meeting you,’ she added, before she stepped out of the room.

***

It felt like hours before he finally picked up the files. It felt like seconds. The pile worried at the edge of his sight, sometimes like a huge spider he couldn’t get rid of and just had to ignore, sometimes like a grenade he had to jump on before it was too late, and in the end he grabbed the files just to get it over with. He did so clumsily. Papers nearly spilled to the floor.

 _Knowing beats not knowing, as the cat said._ It wasn’t funny at all, but he still felt a bile-green bubble of laughter rise in his throat.

It wasn’t funny laughter, either.

He sat on the couch and placed the files on the seat next to him. DECEASED. The letters looked at him from the top file’s cover. They’d been stamped at a ninety-degree angle, but he didn’t need to turn the folder around to read them. The label on the file read DERNIER, JACQUES E.

Bucky’s fingers flew over the pasteboard and the papers inside. _God, Jacques’s only…_ Sixty-nine. According to the obituaries in the file, one in English, the other in French, Jacques had been sixty-nine when he’d died of a stroke in 1980.

He closed the folder, set it aside, glanced at the shield almost without noticing it, and moved on to the next file. Another DECEASED stamp. DUGAN, TIMOTHY A. Bucky took a couple of seconds to recognise Dum Dum’s real name. He was sure the man himself had trouble remembering it. Hell, come to that—

He froze in place, eyes raised halfway to the shield. He’d been about to joke with Steve about Dum Dum’s mother being a tad uncertain about his real name.

He rubbed his eyes, then yanked the file open. This one was thicker than the first file, and paper rustled as he flipped over newspaper clippings, records sheets, reports with long redacted lines like black snakes. Timothy Aloysius Dugan, Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D (retired), dead in 1989 of stomach cancer, aged seventy-seven.

More files. More DECEASED stamps. God, the pile of files was so big. Whatever had made him think it was small? FALSWORTH, JAMES M., dead in 1968, aged fifty-four, car crash. The file said the driver of a delivery vehicle had lost control due to faulty breaks and in a split-second Falsworth swung his car around so he’d take the brunt of the impact, likely saving the life of his seventeen-year-old son Brian. Yeah, that was just like him, Bucky thought. _That, and not wanting to be called Monty._ His eyes and his throat stung, as though the files were covered in dust.

Still his fingers kept moving. Another file. JONES, GABRIEL D. Dead in 1999, eighty-one, congestive heart failure.

Another. MORITA, JAMES P. Dead in 2005, eighty-six, natural causes.

Howard Stark had a file too. DECEASED. Bucky couldn’t help but startle a little when he flipped through the file and came across a headline that ended with _IN FATAL CAR CRASH_. For a moment he wondered if some of the file contents had got mixed up. But no, they were two different car crashes, twenty-three years apart. This one had involved only one vehicle, a rain-slicked road, and had cost the lives of millionaire industrialist and inventor Howard Stark and his wife Maria. In another eerie coincidence, they were survived by a seventeen-year-old son.

‘Lots of that going around,’ Bucky said, and didn’t realise he was talking out loud, even if only in a whisper, until the words were out of his mouth. They left a sour taste on his tongue.

He sat still for a moment before he moved on to the next file. There were bits and pieces of lives in those folders, in the mimeographed newspaper clippings, the vital stats sheets with their sparse numbers. There were awards and reunions, there were weddings and birth announcements. In his head they mixed together with the letters on the DECEASED stamps, black and blocky and dry. He rubbed his eyes again, then caught himself about to scratch his stump. The pain was flowing back in, a dull red throb under his skin.

The next file had a different stamp. RETIRED.

The label read CARTER, MARGARET A.

Peggy was still alive. She must be ninety-two now, but she was still alive. He tried to picture her grey-haired and stooped with age, and found out he couldn’t.

His hand hovered above the closed file. He made a fist, let it drop back onto his thigh. He didn’t know why, but the idea of rifling through Peggy’s file felt like going over her private notebook. Maybe it was the fact she was still alive.

Maybe it was the thought of seeing her again. No, he couldn’t do that to her. Him being here might be a cruel prank, but he wasn’t going to play it on her. An image rose up, unbidden and unwanted: him showing up at her place, saying _Hey, Peggy. It turns out I’m back. Funny story. Speaking of stories, shall we reminisce about Steve?_

 _Knock it off_ , he wanted to tell himself, but the words that came out of his mouth instead were ‘I’m sorry.’

 _I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry._ Like that made a difference. Like that changed a damned thing. He set Peggy’s file aside, unopened. His hand shook a little.

The next file was different from the others. The cover was a slightly different shade of buff, pristine where the others showed a little wear and tear. It was unlabelled, unstamped, but he didn’t need any of that to know what it would be about.

The pain in the nub of flesh remaining below his left shoulder had increased a little, but it was nothing compared to the itch under the bandage, the little jerks he felt from time to time, as though his left arm was trying to stir awake. He wanted nothing better than to tear the gauze away and start scratching, but of course his fingers moved instead to the edge of the file and opened it.

He had to finish this now, like that fairytale about the woman who’d looked into the locked room with all the dead wives’ heads.

( _Steve, remember when we—_ )

There was a newspaper clipping, yellow and brittle with age, about a memorial to—Steve, mostly, but to him too, apparently, like he was some kind of hero—being dedicated at Arlington. His family was mentioned in a line.

Another newspaper clipping, but this one was a copy.

It was his mother’s obituary.

It was short. He could cover almost all of the text with his thumb. The lines didn’t smudge as he touched them.

Winifred Barnes Raymond, February 4 1948, after long illness. Beloved wife and mother. Survived by her husband and daughter.

His eyes felt very dry.

He turned the page.

There was a photo of his sister. She looked older than when he’d last seen her, the last traces of baby fat gone from her face. She she was wearing a gown and one of those square caps, and even though the photo was bad, he could see the sheen in her eyes, the half-smile as though she couldn’t quite believe what was happening. The tiny type under the photo—not so tiny now, he could read it perfectly—said _Rebecca P. Barnes, doctorate in Bio-Chemistry_. Some of the other text around the picture told him the photo had been taken in 1953.

_Help her make something of herself._

His gaze flicked to Peggy’s file. _Thank you_ , he wanted to say, as though she’d be able to hear him through the folded card. Instead he had to blink fog off his sight.

The next page was another copy of a newspaper clipping, this time about the opening of an exhibit about Captain America and the Howling Commandos at the Smithsonian. He picked out the faces of his sister and his step-dad, two small black and white blurs in the photo.

A wedding announcement. His sister had become Rebecca Barnes Prado in June 1957. Her husband was a musician, a bass player. Becca was described in one line: “Dr Barnes works at the National Institutes of Health”.

 _Dr Barnes_. He was still getting used to putting the two words together. ‘He better have made you happy, kiddo,’ he whispered, and turned the page.

Another obituary, this time his step-dad’s. John Raymond, October 1957, short illness, will be greatly missed. He must have hung on long enough to make it to the wedding. Bucky dry-swallowed, tried to not think of the last time he’d seen his step-dad, hugging him briefly, as though Bucky had been about to go to the Adirondacks instead of off to war.

He turned another page. His sister did things involving words like _protein translocation pathway_ and _eukaryotic split genes_ and _modulation of membrane conductivity_ , the sort of stuff he was sure he couldn’t even _look at_ right, let alone say or understand. _Always knew you were the smart one_ , he thought. There were things copied from some kind of bulletins or newsletters. _Dr Rebecca Prado appointed Associate Professor of Molecular Biology at the Department of— Professor Prado states that the $7million grant will provide— The session will be conducted by Professor Rebecca Prado, the Albert and Elizabeth Pierce Chair in Applied Biochemistry and Molecular Biology and—_ She showed up in photographs once in a while. Her hair grew shorter, longer, shorter again, her clothes changed from suit jackets to blouses to sweaters. The last few photos were in colour.

He touched the paper, gently, as though it might crumble to dust. His fingertips brushed the spots in the picture where waves of light brown hair were now streaked with grey, where the skin had grown lined with age. Then he lifted his hand and scratched his chest lightly, almost without noticing it. He wasn’t itchy, though. There was a tightness inside his ribcage, a wire digging deeper and deeper into his flesh.

He turned the last page. There was no obituary. Instead there were a few sheets of paper stapled together, _Curriculum Vitae_ printed at the top, followed by his sister’s name. His gaze flicked briefly over the part titled _Publications_ (it wasn’t as though he’d understand anything much beyond stuff like “the” and “a” anyway), paused for a few moments on the line that said only _Consultant: CDC, DARPA, S.H.I.E.L.D._ , then returned to the top, to the lines starting with the words _Address_ and _Telephone_.

His hand slammed the file shut before he could think, so fast and brusquely the edge of the folder send another file spilling to the floor. He glanced at the shield, started to get up, then sank back to the couch when he realised there was one last file in the pile.

_Some of what you missed out on._

This must be the file Fury had been holding, Bucky thought as he opened it. The first few documents were reports about what the Commandos had done during the rest of the war. Quite a few Hydra higher-ups had been captured during the mop up operations, then tried and convicted. _Good job and good riddance_. Ghost cold hit him as he turned the page. For a second he was back in a place full of glass and steel and ice, but the glowing cube he was looking at, the one he’d seen gobbling up a whole man in a flash of light and a lingering smell of ash, was only a photograph. The Tesseract, the file called it. Howard had dug it up from the ocean like Bucky himself had been dug up from ice.

Couldn’t any of these people ever leave well enough alone?

More Commandos operations, this time with black bars redacting some of the text. The black bars grew more numerous as he turned the pages. Things that could accidentally level whole cities and had to be contained. An incident with a biological weapon in West Virginia. Terrorist bombings with some kind of classified flying weapons. An attack on a New Mexico town involving a “trans-dimensional incursion”, whatever that was.

He closed the file. Thoughts roiled about in his head, but even though pinning one down was hard, he still knew what kind of game Fury must be playing. The pages tucked inside the folded card were meant to whisper: _You’re needed._ And: _There are things you should be doing._ And: _At least you should know what you’d be turning your back on._

Like he didn’t know that. He looked at the shield again, head-on, and there was snow, a train whistle, weight slipping out of his grip. A borrowed (stolen) suit, ill-fitting.

He scrunched his eyes shut for a moment, as if that would stop the images from showing up behind his eyelids, then jumped to his feet, tried to grab all the files with one hand, knocked a few more to the floor, and eventually managed to toss them all onto the chair, behind the shield, where he wouldn’t have to look at them.

Like he didn’t know what it was like, to have just one thing to do and fail miserably.

And then be brought back so he could be reminded of it for the rest of his borrowed (stolen) life.

Something boiling-hot rose inside him and for a split-second he wasn’t sure if he was going to throw up, sob, or scream. Instead he did neither, and laughter started spilling out, just chuckles at first, then full-on belly laughs, the kind that made him double over while tears streamed down his face. He sounded like he was going off his rocker, he knew, and maybe he was, the laughter the broken-edged kind you’d expect in a madhouse. He was soon in pain, blinded by the tears, but he kept going, unable to stop himself, and by the time the laughter slowed down his throat felt raw. Still hiccuping chuckles, he managed to grab the television control and turn the thing on. At least the sound might cover up the noises he was making, stop the doctors from bursting in with a butterfly net and one of those fetching long-sleeved canvas jackets.

One of the news stations was running a year-in-review programme. He’d forgotten it was the last day of the year (sixty-six years, seven months, twenty-five days), that in a few hours’ time it would be 2012. Sixty-seven years minus four months and six days.

The footage managed to quieten him. Soon he was just shaking from time to time, a weak guffaw slicing its way out of his mouth once a while. On the screen, the months ticked away: Super Bowl. An earthquake in Japan. Artificial organ successfully transplanted. Same-sex marriage legalised in New York. Civil war in Syria. Volcano in Iceland. He leaned his head on his knees, tried to pretend the sound was just the hum of planes or distant gunfire, the kind he could sleep through.

‘—tain America.’

His head snapped up. On the screen a woman huddled inside an enormous fur-trimmed coat, leaning into a microphone while the wind whipped about strands of her hair. Behind her there was only night and weakly lit ice. ‘—years later, it seems scientists may have found the wreckage.’ The ticker at the bottom of the screen read _Captain America plane found in the Arctic?_

 _Oh Christ_. He grabbed the control pad again to turn the volume up, but instead managed to press the wrong key and the screen went blue. Frantically, he pressed other buttons, trying to bring the right station back. All he managed to do was fill the screen with boxes, and finally turn the whole thing to static. He pressed the red button and the television went black and silent.

Well, what else had he expected? If he decided to put on a star-spangled costume for Director Fury, it was all going to come out sooner or later, wasn’t it? Someone was bound to notice. Someone…

He turned to look at the sleek black obelisk sitting on the bedside table, and before he could think his body was standing up and picking up the telephone. All he could do was watch, like a passenger, while his fingers copied what he’d seen people on the television do and pressed the buttons for the telephone number that had burrowed into his brain the moment he’d read it.

The number appeared on the wireless telephone’s screen but nothing happened. Did he have to—

He pressed the green button with his thumb.

There was a dialling sound. He put the device to his ear just as a woman’s voice came on the line.

‘The extension you have dialled was not recognised.’

‘Hello, operator?’ he said, but the voice on the other hand was already moving on.

‘If you have a five-digit extension, please enter it now. For an emer—’

‘Sorry, I don’t have an extension, I just want to—’

But the voice didn’t deviate from its script, since—he realised with a hot flush of embarrassment—it was a recording. ‘—for an outside line. Press hash for—’

‘Wait,’ he couldn’t help but say. That was what he needed, wasn’t it? The outside line. Nine. He was pretty sure the recording lady had said nine.

He lowered the phone, pressed the right button, and dialled the number again. This time the ring sounded once, twice, three times. _Come on_ , he thought, and wasn’t sure if he wanted someone to pick up or the ringing to just stop. She wasn’t at home. The number was wrong. He could just set this thing down and—

There was a click after the fifth ring, an intake of breath, then a voice. ‘Hi! I mean, hello-who’s-speaking.’

It was high and reedy, a child’s voice. A little girl, he thought, still young enough to have just learned the correct greeting and sound proud that she remembered it all.

 _Hello_. The word seemed to be stuck under his tongue. He cleared his throat, tried again. ‘Hello. I’m looking for a lady called Rebecca. I—an older lady. Do you know her?’ _Is she your mommy_ , he almost asked, but stopped himself in time. This kid was far too young to be his sister’s daughter. ‘I’m… a friend of hers.’

The little girl pondered it for a few moments. ‘What’s your name?’ she finally said.

A split-second of hesitation. ‘James.’ A balloon was swelling inside his chest, icy and hot. ‘What’s your name, sweetheart?’

‘Rikki, and James is my uncle James’ name,’ she added, sounding slightly conspiratorial.

His eyes and throat stung again, like when he’d been reading the files. ‘That’s great. Rikki is a great name.’ He stopped. He seemed to have run out of words. ‘Can you—’

‘I’ll get her,’ the little girl said. Bucky heard her set the phone down, then skip away as she yelled _Grammy Becca!_

He could hear sounds in the background: the hubbub of people talking, a faint sizzling noise, bits of music. Footsteps, heavier and slower than the little girl’s (his grand-niece’s). A dog barked, once, followed by a burst of laughter. ‘Leave it, Jake,’ an older boy said, and was cut off as a door was shut.

‘Hello?’

The voice was huskier than when he’d last heard it, the edges warbling slightly with age. The voice of a woman who was eighty-four, not a teenaged girl.

Her voice.

‘Hello?’ she repeated.

He couldn’t speak. He couldn’t even breathe. The phone was a burning coal in his hand. He thumbed the buttons again, sure that he could still hear the voice pouring out of the speaker, until he pressed the button with the red symbol, hard enough to make the key pop out a little, and the phone went silent.

He tossed it on the bed and felt his strength drain away like it was being bled out, until he was sinking to the floor. The pressure inside his ribcage fastened around his stomach, and then he was on his knees, sure that this time he really was going to be sick.

After a while, he was breathing again, in and out. _Christ, Buck. Pull yourself together_. He wiped his eyes with the back of his hand, rubbed his face, then got back on his feet. The itching was back. He had to—

He didn’t know what he had to do. He just knew he couldn’t stay here. If he did he was going to scratch his own skin off.

He knew there was an ink pencil in the nightstand’s drawer. He grabbed a newspaper, set it on the bed, and held it in place with his knee as he wrote _I’m fine, just had something to do. Don’t come after me_ on the top of the back page. When he was done he looked at his own handwriting for a second before he added _please_ at the beginning of the second sentence and _James Barnes_ at the bottom of the note. He knew it was dumb, but maybe they would take him at his word a bit more if he signed it.

Moments later, he’d put on a coat and a pair of loafers and was climbing out one of the windows, the shield slung over his shoulder. He stood on the sill and looked down, at the side-street that led towards Seventh. There were a few people below him, dot-sized, but none of them noticed the man standing ten storeys up, at least not yet. His head swayed as he looked down at the pavement and his hand fastened on the window’s edge.

_This isn’t payback, is it?_

God, he hated heights.

_Stop looking down, then._

He forced himself to look at the building’s facade. He had expected cornices, convenient footholds, a drain pipe he could shimmy down, but that sort of stuff only happened in bad serials, the kind where you might as well just make a rope out of bedsheets. Instead there was only smooth granite.

No, that wasn’t true, there were gaps between the slabs of granite, maybe large enough for a toehold. And if he got to the corner—

He glanced down again and he was sure the height had doubled. The whole of his insides seesawed. Well, too bad. He had something to do and he didn’t want to come across anyone, to have to explain himself, to be asked questions. To find out how close to a prisoner he really was. He made himself edge across the window sill, until he could press his chest and one leg against the facade, and slipped the tip of one foot onto the tiny ledge created by the gap. Cold wind ruffled his hair, plastered the coat’s empty sleeve against the wall. He did his best to ignore the din of traffic, the way it sounded like it was coming from miles and miles below.

He stopped moving once he was sure he had a halfway decent foothold, and managed to push down the knot of ice in his stomach. Very slowly, he began to loosen his grip on the edge of the open window. This was going to be tricky with only one arm, but if he was careful—

He didn’t have time to finish the thought before his hand slipped and he plunged towards the street below.

 

**TBC…**

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Man, Bucky can’t get enough of falling off high places in any universe, huh? Rikki is a shout-out to Rikki Barnes, who is Peggy and Bucky’s teenaged granddaughter from a comics AU. (She’s also a super-hero, because clearly these people stand to super-heroing as the Leakeys stand to palaeontology.) In the comics Bucky’s younger sister Rebecca married someone named Proctor. Obviously in this AU her life has been quite different (and this is the MCU anyway), but clearly I love making terrible name-related in-jokes. Regarding Bucky’s voracious appetite, when Peggy says in CA:TFA that Steve’s metabolism burns four times faster than the average person’s, I assume this means the super-soldier serum increased his basal metabolic rate four-fold. I Can’t Believe It’s Not Super-Soldier Serum presumably works in much the same way, so given Bucky’s size and (typical) levels of physical activity, he would need something like 12,000-16,000 calories a day. I don’t know how many fics there are out there with Steve and/or Bucky eating large pizzas as a light snack, needing a hacksaw and a stepladder to cut their sandwiches in half, etc, but however many there are, the real answer is clearly _not enough_.


	5. Endings

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The first thing I’m doing after my big performance review/my holiday/Passover is posting this chapter, a fact which I hope demonstrates my commitment to this fic. ;) Also, this is the last _Buck ~~Rogers~~ Barnes in the 21st Century_ chapter, and from Chapter 6 onwards we’ll be getting into the meat of the action. So I hope you do enjoy this chapter, but I also hope you’ll enjoy the stuff I have planned for later on!

**05. _Endings_**

He was falling. He didn’t have time to cry out, didn’t even have time to think. His body instinctively curled up and his arm held out the shield beneath him just seconds before he slammed the pavement.

Someone cried out ‘Holy sh—’ but they didn’t get to finish. Bucky hit the ground with a loud, vibrating _thunk_ , the force of the blow hard enough to slam his jaw shut and turn everything black for a split second. His leg struck the concrete with a white starburst of pain, then the stump hit the metal rim and he was sure he was sure he was going to pass out.

He didn’t. Instead he opened his eyes, blinked once, twice, and started hoisting himself up. It was easier said than done: his insides were seesawing like a ship in a storm and he felt like he’d just gone ten rounds with the Thick Skull again. Still, either he was alive, or the pearly gates looked remarkably like a street in Manhattan. He got to his feet, the shield hanging off his arm by one strap. His left leg started to throb. The shield had absorbed most of the impact, but the landing hadn’t been great.

 _Next time, it’ll_ —

‘Hell.’ It was the same man who’d cried out before, Bucky was sure, but it was hard to tell with so many people around. The man stood and stared on the edge of the pavement, and Bucky tried to look nonchalant as he walked past him. The last thing he needed was to draw a crowd of rubberneckers, though he supposed he would draw less attention to himself if he weren’t wobbling quite so much.

‘You OK, man?’ The man’s eyes went to the shield and widened a little. Bucky was sure the white object in the man’s hand was one of those future telephones you could carry around, and he was even more sure that he didn’t want the man to use it.

‘Yeah,’ Bucky said. At least his voice wasn’t shaking. There was that. ‘It’s all pretend, buddy. For the picture.’

‘What pic—’ the man started to say, but Bucky hurried away, darting around other people in the street, trying to do his best not to trip over his own feet and to look like he had things to do and places to go. He broke into a shaky half-run and ducked around a corner, into a smaller side-street. There was a snarl of traffic and there were plenty of people out, but he spotted a concrete overhang above the back entrance to a theatre and he snuck under it, behind a row of big concrete pots holding cold-shrivelled shrubs.

He leaned back against a wall that smelled only faintly of damp and old garbage and let out a long, shuddering breath. Every muscle felt like a sack of jelly. The shield nearly slipped off his arm.

 _Ten storeys_ , he thought, and his heart decided to start thumping against his ribcage as though it had just realised what had happened. He looked at his hand, still clenched into a fist around one of the shield’s straps. He’d got used quickly to the way things looked sharper and brighter now, the way they remained picture-perfect in his mind after he closed his eyes, but in his second time in the shower he’d still stared and stared at the pearls of water on his fingers. And now he’d fallen ten storeys onto concrete and he was sure he didn’t have anything worse than a few bruises. Most of it had been the shield, he was sure, but part of it had been… well, him. The mix of stuff coursing through his veins.

It took a second. Ever since the things after Azzano, thinking about—

_stop it_

—them always made him want to reach for some steel wool and try to scrub Zola’s sticky fingerprints off all the places he couldn’t see.

Right now, he still felt the same, but this time it took him a second.

 _Enough of that_. He straightened up, peeled off the coat, slung the shield on his back—with only one arm, the left strap hung loose, and the right strap dug awkwardly into his shoulder—and slipped the coat on again, stuffing the end of the left sleeve into his pocket. It took forever with just the one hand, and when he was done he was sure he looked like he was smuggling a giant dinner plate under his clothes, but what the hell. This was New York, for Christ’s sake. All these people had probably seen a man walking around with a live chicken under one arm and had made nothing of it.

He stepped back into the street, trying not to gawk at everything like he’d just got off the boat. He’d been in this street before, he was sure, knew the buildings despite the sleek cars and the strange clothes and the strange hairstyles. He had expected it to feel reassuring, but instead it was like coming up to someone who looked like a friend only to get close and realise you were looking at a stranger.

He made himself keep his head down and started walking southwards, towards Lower Manhattan. The streets glowed with Christmas lights and despite the cold and the night barely having started, he could hear music and there were enough people around to almost jostle him. It was New Year’s Eve, he remembered. He supposed there was going to be some kind of party, maybe even the ball drop at Times Square, if they didn’t shoot it into space these days. There was definitely something happening—there were cops setting up traffic barriers and he hurried in the opposite direction, against the flow of pedestrians, sure that at any moment one of the cops was going to hear something on one of those little radios they were carrying, turn towards him, and say ‘Hey!’

Nobody noticed him, though, or if they did they pretended not to, just like New Yorkers had done back in his day. He cut eastwards, towards Bryant Park and the public library, if they were still there. It was hard to keep his speed up. It was harder still not to wander about in a slack-jawed daze, despite all he’d already seen in the television, despite him having spent almost all his life in this city, knowing its streets and its grey and its hardness like the back of his hand.

 _The one I left in the ice_. The thought caught in his throat for some reason, and he had to disguise it with a cough. Nobody was paying any attention, though. The people filling up Bryant Park were too busy walking around glass buildings lit up as brightly as the big Christmas tree and thronging in the ice rink to notice him at all.

After a while he just wandered southwards, not really caring where he was, his face numb to the cold but his insides feeling like they were dripping with icicles. It wasn’t the streets, he realised. So many of the buildings were still the same, even if they were now wedged against skyscrapers glistening with glass and light, high into the clouds. He stopped for a moment by a shop window containing a display of cameras, some small enough to fit comfortably in his pocket, others fitted out with lenses so big you could probably use them to bludgeon someone to death. The ad copy said things like “megapixels” and “Sale: now $499”. He tried to stop his brain from calculating how many months of pay that was (six).

It wasn’t the people either. A woman with braids leaned into a machine embedded in a wall, then hurried away as she tucked a glossy red wallet into a handbag studded with metal rivets. Music of the kind he’d only heard on the television spilled from a car that drove past him. He watched as a slightly tipsy group got food he’d never heard about from a truck parked by a kerb, the sounds of sizzling oil and the smell of fried beef and spices making his stomach knot with hunger, then he walked away before anyone started wondering about what he was doing. Their talk had been peppered with words and names he’d never heard before.

Near Grand Central Station, which was still in the same place, a girl with white streaks in her short hair played a guitar, a battered case opened at her feet. ‘Help a starving musician, dude?’ she asked as she strummed a few chords. It took Bucky a split second to realise she was talking to him.

She looked terribly young under the layers of make-up around her eyes, her light brown skin shiny with cold, and even though he was sure there was nothing in his pocket, he still rooted around for a bit in search of some overlooked stray change before his hand came up empty. ‘Sorry, ma’am.’ She said nothing, just looked at his empty left sleeve for a moment before she looked away and started another song.

It wasn’t the city, and it wasn’t the people. It was him, he finally realised as soon as he saw the familiar hulk of the Brooklyn Bridge and the things that had been churning low in his belly rose into his throat.

It was him, wandering about for god knew how long in this city he knew and didn’t, going around in circles in Lower Manhattan as though he’d finally come across something that would make it all make sense, that would stop the throbbing inside his skull. If this were a Republic serial or a Captain Future pulp he would wonder if it was all a dream—wasn’t that what the ordinary folks characters did when things got weird or hairy? But the thought hadn’t even occurred to him ever since he’d opened his eyes as himself instead of a drugged, pain-wrecked lump. Everything since then had been the the same kind of real as washing hanging on a line, a broken window pane. Like the steel girders and the rumble of cars driving past and the smell of exhaust and the East River. It wasn’t the kind of thing you made up.

He made it to Brooklyn, finally, where there were fewer huge boxes of concrete and windows like rows of eyes, but there were still lights, noise, people. He passed some kind of dance club or bar that spilled out thumping bass music and where, near the door, a boy jammed his thumbs on a device like his life depended on it, walked by a diner with a glowing golden sign and the mouthwatering scent of salt and grease.

It got quieter, though, the closer he got to—

_Home._

No. The streets were still alike enough that they kept tricking him into moving by muscle memory, but once in a while there were missing steps, kerbs in the wrong places, walls that shouldn’t be there. Cars everywhere, the kinds even he could tell were expensive, trees lining the streets, walls and stairs scrubbed clean. Even the smell was wrong. Near Hicks Street he saw a garbage can with its lid blown off, trash spilled on the pavement, and it made him a little relieved, maybe even happy. He stopped by a shop window under a sign saying T-Mobile and his nose filled with the ghost-smell of dried fish in the sun, his ears heard the bell ring as the door swung open. Becca’s small hand, sticky with molasses, clung to his left one.

Not the city. Not the people. It was him, as out of place here as he’d been inside Steve’s uniform, as the weight of the shield on his back. They’d fought for this, hadn’t they, when you really got down to it? So that people could live, so that they didn’t have to try to survive under a boot. And even though there were always boots, it turned out people had lived. New people. New things. New cities laid over old ones like new skin over old bones.

He’d been willing to lay down his life, when it came down to it. Not because he was a hero, but because that was the way things had been.

He just wished he’d been taken at his word.

Finally, he came to a full stop. This was the place. Still the same building, like he’d left yesterday.

No, not yesterday. Two years ago.

A fifth-storey walkup where you didn’t have room to swing a cat, where you could practically see your breath in the winter and had to strip to your underwear in the summer, where the weekly smell of frying sausages coming down the corridor at least covered up the faint odour of boiled cabbage that seemed to permeate everything.

But it was theirs, had been theirs. This time he did close his eyes, felt himself wash glue off his hands with a bit of turpentine while Steve finished his sketches of a cornucopia of fruits for some grocery store. Saw himself take two beers from the ice-box, nudge it with one foot because the drip spigot was always busted and they couldn’t afford to replace it. Steve was done for the day and he didn’t have a shift tonight, so the two of them could sit back on the good couch, listen to the radio, talk about what they’d do with their money when they became the hotshots of Madison Avenue (Real Soon).

He opened his eyes. The building had had its face scrubbed, but that wasn’t really the biggest change. Now it stood in a street full of parked cars shiny with chrome and smooth coats of paint, bordered by trees hung with strings of tiny blue lights. The windows had thick curtains and blinds instead of clothes hung up to dry.

Where the entrance to the building had been—he could still see the little bit of glass missing from the fanlight above the door; a kid had broken it playing ball and it had never been replaced—there was now a storefront, tables dimly visible through the windows. The sign read _The Thai Dining Company_. Bucky took a step towards the restaurant, and then another, and another, until his hand was on the cold glass and his own reflection half-hid the counter, the shapes of chairs and paper decorations hanging in the shadows like ghost moths. The window felt solid against his palm, as he knew it would, but some little part of him kept insisting that any minute now the restaurant would vanish into smoke, that he would reach forward and grab the doorknob you had to rattle before you could get it to turn…

He stepped back. There was a specials board by the restaurant’s entrance, a purple and white chalk header saying _Cocktails_ and the text underneath exhorting diners to _Try our new passionfruit mojito_. At ten bucks a pop it’d better come in a glass made of gold, he thought, but instead of being amused he just felt like he’d swallowed a mouthful of ash.

His shoulder throbbed from the shield strap digging into it and the pain in the stump had started to flow back in. He sat down on the kerb, where there were no cars, slowly peeled off his coat, then placed the shield on his knees. The night was sharp with cold, but he barely noticed. He looked down at the shield, the white star yellowish under the streetlights, and ran his thumb over the spots where bullets and shrapnel had left tiny scores on the metal that the paint hadn’t covered up completely.

He didn’t know how long he sat before he started hearing fireworks going off. The first bursts made him flinch, even though he knew they were coming, but soon enough he stopped feeling his heart hitting his ribcage. The fireworks continued, the noise hammering the night sky. He couldn’t really see them, not where he was sitting, but once in a while he saw a flash of green or blue out of the corner of his eye. Music spilled out of a window somewhere. Another string of fireworks went off, a row of sounds like artillery shells. A car drove past him. The people inside it didn’t notice him.

It was 2012.

Sixty-six years, seven months, and twenty-six days.

‘Happy New Year, Steve.’ He looked up at the sky, which was starless and hazy with clouds. He could almost see the cold, hanging in the air like feathers, numbing his face.

He didn’t know if he believed in souls or angels or heaven. In the ice there had been nothing. Just empty dark.

But he did believe in Steve. Had believed in Steve, not because Steve was Captain America, not because he glowed with a halo made up of righteousness and the American Way and possibly hundreds of tiny bald eagles, like in those awful serials, but because Steve didn’t. Because Steve had grown up with him in this city and its gilded edges and its meanness, because he knew about breadlines and he knew what it was like to have to pick two out of food, medicine, and rent. Because he held on to grudges like an old dog worrying an older bone but he would step in between a bully and a bigger bully because that just wasn’t right, and when he said “I’m going to give you a chance to put things right”, he meant it, and if you took him up on it, the two of you were square. Because he was the world’s kindest winner and the world’s sorest loser. Because he was so proud and so pig-headed that he’d taken what was sure to be a one-way trip thirty miles behind enemy lines because even death couldn’t say no forever. And because he was such a jerk that he’d joked and grinned like the cat who got the cream, even then.

So he wasn’t too surprised when he heard Steve’s voice in his head, felt him some place under the skin, a little spark of warmth where his arm no longer felt anything. Bucky knew it wasn’t real, that it was just in his head, that he was making it up, that Steve was gone.

Just maybe not completely, or not forever. How could he?

_Seventy years waiting around and you still managed to miss all the good stuff._

‘Shut up.’ He wiped dew off his eyelashes with the back of his hand, then touched his fingertips to the shield. The metal felt only a little cold. ‘I’m sorry, Steve.’ He lifted his head, spoke to the night sky. ‘I’m sorry I let you die. I’m sorry you decided it was worth jumping off that train for me, but for someone who was smart you could be a real dummy sometimes, you know?’

A winking red light crossed the sky before the aircraft vanished into a cloud bank.

‘Don’t know why I ended up here. I thought for sure it was all going to end when I landed that bird in the ice. I mean, that’s how it should have gone, isn’t it? It’s like it’s all a joke. A bad one.’ He looked down at the shield again, blinked more cold and dampness away. ‘They want me to be you, you know. I don’t want to. I don’t think I even want to be me right now,’ he added with a chuckle, small and bitter. It turned into a sharp snuffle. His nose was stuffy. In a classy flick, it would be tears, but here in the real world it was mostly snot. ‘I’m just—I’m not a hero. I’m just a regular guy. And I know that’s what you thought everyone is, but…’

He stopped talking. The words felt stuck under his tongue, as though they’d been frozen solid. What did he want? To bury the shield. There was an empty grave at Arlington. It was always going to be empty, but now there was something to lay to rest. He had that, at least.

If he tried to think beyond that, his mind went blank, like the last few pages in a book after _The End_.

_Never thought I’d see the day when you didn’t know what do, Buck. Someone should take a picture._

‘Hey, I thought you were the man with the plan.’ He managed a smile, lopsided and weak.

_And you’re Sergeant James Buchanan Barnes of the 107th._

That didn’t come in Steve’s voice, it was one of his own, stray thoughts. After Bucky had read those news stories about the memorial and the museum and his medals, he kept thinking about how nobody had found him out after all. They all thought he had been brave when he wasn’t, when bravery had had nothing to do with it. He might have fantasised about being a big hero when he was still stateside, but once it was boots on the ground, reality had crushed all that like tank treads. Keep your men alive, keep yourself alive. And even though he knew what was right and what was wrong and that the Nazis and their buddies were about as wrong as it got, he’d still had felt sick enough to die the first time he’d killed some poor bastard.

He’d carried on, though. Because someone had to win this war, and then because somebody had to stop Hydra and if it was down to him helping, then he would help. Because he’d had a job to do and he’d see it done and he’d be damned if he was going to let Hydra take anything else on his watch. Because when it was finished, they would all get to go home. It would still be there.

Well, here he was.

_No._

He looked at the sky above the brownstones’ roofs, the starlight barely visible beyond the yellowish haze of the street lights. He wasn’t home, not really. Maybe he’d be, some day soon.

Maybe he just wasn’t done yet.

Was that the answer? Steve was right about him, he’d usually always known what to do. But that was only because it had always been easy, and even when it got hard it was still easy to figure out what were the right rules, the right orders. Now he was in a place where he was never meant to be, as alien as those glowing signs all over Manhattan, the words people used, the things scribbled on the chalk board behind him. What did Fury think he could do to help, really?

_You gotta at least try, Buck._

That was a little bit Steve and a little bit himself, he knew, but that didn’t make it any less true. He was Sergeant James Buchanan Barnes of the 107th. Not a hero. Just someone who kept on keeping on.

‘All right, then,’ he whispered, voice hoarse with cold. ‘I’ll do it. I know I can’t be you, but… what you’d do. I’ll try to do that. Even though it hardly seems fair you went and dumped it on me, you knucklehead.’

He felt a little relief once the words were out of his mouth, as though an itch he’d grown too used to had suddenly stopped. He ran his fingers over the shield, still hesitatingly, then reached up, a little stiffly, to scratch the stump inside the left sleeve. He knew he shouldn’t do it, but the pain in the wound was growing duller-edged every day and the doctors seemed pleased whenever they looked at it. He knew that the serum made him heal faster, just like it had made him stronger and heavier, just like it had made him able to survive seventy years in the ice and falling off a tenth floor window.

A memory darted up, one of the ones he didn’t like thinking about. But he could do nothing to stop it, to make himself not see Steve in his officer uniform, real as life, to block the smell of Chesterfields and gin. _I’m fine, Steve. How did they pull that off, they just feed you a lot? There’s something I need to ask you, Buck._

The sound of an engine cut in before he could remember too much. He looked at the street to see a limo that looked too fancy even for this place come up the road, but instead of driving past him, it began to slow, then turned towards the stretch of kerb where Bucky was sitting. There was plenty of room to park, but the limo kept crawling in his direction. The driver probably didn’t mind hitting a bum who was inconveniencing such a nice stretch of pavement.

‘Christ, hold your horses,’ Bucky grumbled as he scrambled to his feet and away from the tarmac, shield dangling from his hand. He wondered if he should get it out of sight.

The limo finally came to a full stop a foot away from the kerb. The engine was idling but the windows were too dark for Bucky to see inside, and even when the one at the back lowered with a whirr, he still could only make out two shapes inside, sharper eyes or not.

‘Hey,’ a man said, from inside the limo.

Bucky knew the street was empty, but he couldn’t help but glance around. He didn’t think S.H.I.E.L.D. hunted people down using limos, and who else in this whole city would be looking for him?

‘Is this a bad time?’ the man added. His tone was breezy, but Bucky knew when he was being mocked. Lightly, but still mocked.

‘Sorry, you’ve got me confused with someone else,’ he said.

‘No, you’re definitely the right defrosted WWII vet,’ the man said, then stuck his head out the window. ‘Love the patriotic frisbee, by the way.’ He paused for a split-second, but not long enough for Bucky to say anything. ‘Come on. Get in the car.’

 

**TBC…**

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> You have no idea how much it took for me not to finish this chapter with ‘Get in the car, loser, we’re going super-heroing.’ No idea.
> 
> Also, cats and dogs are now living together, because I did the thing I kept saying I was too old and set in my ways to do and am now on Tumblr at [mompressor](http://mompressor.tumblr.com). Feel free to follow for over-investment in fictional things and scans from that comic from the 70s in which Bucky is Cap and shirtless Steve tells Bucky to feel him up.
> 
> Finally, I’m sure some of you are wondering when Natasha and Sam will be showing up. Well, the answer is Chapters 7 and 8, respectively. But the real question is “will it be hilarious and also possibly involve some punching and/or the best worst first day at work ever?” Obviously, the answer is yes.


End file.
